


Search and Rescue

by fallintosanity (yopumpkinhead)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, F/M, Season 11, spncasefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 04:05:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6938926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yopumpkinhead/pseuds/fallintosanity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <img/>
</p>
<p>People are dying on Google's sprawling campus, apparently at the hands of... killer statues? Trying to get Sam's mind off Lucifer, Dean picks up the case, and the Winchesters head to California. But the hunt gets complicated when an old college friend of Sam's recognizes them - and threatens to turn them into the police.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For the [SPN Case Fic Mini-Bang!](http://spncasefic.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Fantastic art by the amazing [quickreaver](http://quickreaver.tumblr.com/post/144787458269/woo-hoo-art-for-the-premier-year-of-the-spn-case)!
> 
> Thank you SO much to my awesome beta, [hit-the-books](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hit_the_books/profile)!

Amit Singh hadn’t planned to stay late at work. Or at least, not _this_ late. It was after midnight on Friday night - well, technically Saturday now - and as a single guy who’d moved to Silicon Valley from India four months ago: he really needed to get a social life. But his team had a launch coming up and the feature he was coding was failing six different tests, and he hadn’t wanted to leave until he got it working.

He’d finally got green on all the tests, so he’d pushed the code for his teammates to review once they were awake, and headed out to the parking lot to find his car. The Quad’s lot was crowded at the best of times, and he’d had to park three buildings away, which meant a long and chilly trek across the asphalt. It was the middle of February, and while he knew intellectually that it wasn’t actually all that cold - his phone said 53 degrees - it was a lot colder than what he was used to. It was creepy, too. The tall palm trees lining the parking lot cast swaying, dancing shadows across the sidewalks, and the irregular murmur of traffic on the nearby Highway 101 sounded like unintelligible, ghostly whispers. At least this late at night the traffic had finally died down from its usual bumper-to-bumper jam.

Amit rounded the corner of the last building in the complex - and nearly jumped out of his skin when a huge figure loomed over him. Heart pounding, he staggered backward a few steps before recognizing the gimmicky but fun Android statue People Ops had set up for some event or other last week. The thing was almost seven feet tall and three feet in diameter, and in the dark the scribbles of whiteboard marker across its white surface looked like wounds. Its black plastic eyes glinted reddish in the light of the parking lot’s lamps. _Creepy_ , Amit thought.

He’d almost gotten his heart rate back under control, chuckling silently at his own irrational panic, when the parking lot’s lights flickered, sparked, and died. Sudden darkness enveloped him, except for two dull red spots glowing like embers a foot above his head. As his eyes adjusted, Amit made out the dim white outline of the statue - and saw it turn its head to look at him.

The red spots brightened, fixing on him with sudden hateful intensity.

Amit screamed.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean was worried about Sam.

Granted, that was nothing new. Barring the time he’d spent as a demon, which he tried not to think too much about, because if he did he started to remember how thrillingly, exhilaratingly _satisfying_ it had been to see the terror in Sam’s eyes as he ducked the hammer, feel the shaking in his hand as he held the knife—

_Nope, not thinking about that_.

Anyway. Worrying about Sammy was nothing new, but between Lucifer getting grabby in the cage in Limbo a few weeks ago, and now whatever it was he’d done to Sam while Dean was trapped in a submarine in the past… well, Dean hadn’t been born yesterday. He knew how much coffee they were going through - and by _they_ he meant _Sam_ \- and that the kid had started supplementing with caffeine pills from online health stores. The last time Sam had slept this little, worrying at the scar on his palm, had been years ago when hallucinations of Lucifer had been shredding his mind from the inside out.

Worse, Dean couldn’t get him to freaking _talk_ about it. Any questions that came too close to “Are you okay, Sammy?” were met with a dismissive, “I’m fine, what about you, you come up with anything?” They were better than they had been in years - nobody was mad at anybody for anything, nobody was hiding anything from anybody - but Dean couldn’t shake the feeling that something was still badly broken between him and Sam.

So he did what he could, and hated that that amounted to keeping the coffee stocked and tiptoeing around the bunker whenever Sam finally dropped into an uneasy doze on the table in the library. But with Sam wrapped up in searching for information on Hands of God and the Darkness, that left Dean with nothing to do but think about Cas, which meant _worrying_ about Cas.

He still couldn’t wrap his head around how that had happened, couldn’t imagine what Lucifer had done to trick or force Cas into letting him in. They’d only been in that holding cell for a few minutes, tops. But it had happened, and that meant that somewhere out there, the devil was walking around wearing the body of Dean’s best friend.

So Dean threw himself into looking for cases, for signs of Amara or Lucifer. Looking for anything that might help distract Sam from whatever memories were chewing him up, and Dean from his worry for the two people he cared about most.

He hit paydirt mid-afternoon on Saturday. “Sam!” he called toward the kitchen, and waited for Sam to shamble into the library, fingers wrapped around his ever-present coffee mug. “I think I got us a case.”

“Yeah?” Sam said. He leaned over Dean’s shoulder to peer at the laptop’s screen. “‘Gruesome Murder on Google Campus’?”

“Yeah,” Dean said. He scrolled down through the article, letting Sam read. “Guy was found dead in a parking lot early this morning by cleaning staff. According to the cops, someone pulled the arm off a statue and beat him to death with it.”

Sam leaned on the table and raised his eyebrows. “And you think that’s a case for us?”

Dean flipped to a new tab, revealing a series of bloody crime-scene photos he’d pulled up from the police files. Half of them were of the body, beaten and mangled; the other half were of a large white plaster robot, all rounded edges and domed head like a cartoon character, decorated with colorful scribbles in what looked like whiteboard marker underneath liberal spatterings of blood. “The part they’re not talking about to the press is how the statue’s arm was apparently perfectly reattached, and there’s blood on the statue like the beating happened next to it even though the guy’s body was found two buildings away.”

“...huh,” Sam said. He leaned in close again, studying the photos. “Yeah, that’s pretty sketchy.”

Dean grinned up at him, flipping the laptop closed. “On the road in thirty, Sammy.”

*           *           *

The good thing about the long drive was that Dean could focus on the road, on singing along to the best of mullet rock, and mostly not think about Castiel. And Sam slept much better in the Impala than in the bunker, which meant he actually got several hours of uninterrupted sleep. It bothered Dean - he loved the bunker and wished he could convince Sam to love it, too - but he was at least used to it by now. By the time they pulled into Mountain View, California, late Monday morning, Sam looked a little less haggard and hadn’t pressed on the old scar on his hand for hours. But as they drove through the city, something in his posture shifted, becoming more melancholy as he stared out the window.

Dean didn’t think another attempt at _are you okay_ would go better than any of the others, so he settled for, “Your old stomping grounds, huh?”

Sam didn’t even look at him, his eyes fixed on the city. “Everything looks so different.”

“Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Dean said. “Five years? Six?”

That did earn him a glance, and Dean remembered belatedly that Sam hadn’t been with him the last time he’d been in San Francisco, back when they were working that dragon case. But all Sam said was, “Longer than that.”

“Things change, Sammy,” Dean said. He meant for it to be light, teasing, but Sam looked away again, and in his lap Dean saw his thumb dig into his palm. _Dammit_. How was he supposed to get through to his kid brother, make sure he was okay, if Sam kept him at arm’s length?

A sudden memory flashed through his mind, of Sam holding him at literal arm’s length, a knife gripped awkwardly in his left hand, its blade against Dean’s throat. _Do it_ , Dean had said, and had reveled in the fear in Sam’s eyes—

_No_. He shut the memory down, hard. The Mark was gone and Dean wasn’t a demon anymore, and once all this was over, Amara and Lucifer dealt with and Cas safe again, Dean would figure out how to make it up to Sam.

They drove in silence after that, except for Dean’s muttered curses at the horrible traffic. In just the few years since he’d been here last it seemed like the traffic had multiplied by a hundred, and the Impala spent more time at a standstill than moving forward. Finally Dean spotted a motel that was relatively close to the Google campus and didn’t look too expensive, and managed to extract the car from the gridlock and park.

The motel’s appearance turned out to be deceiving, though: a single tiny room with two beds still cost three figures a night. Sam had hidden a smile when Dean had, ahem, _protested_ the price and been told by the bored clerk to take it or leave it. He’d taken it, reluctantly, because if a crumbling, shabby place like this could get away with rates like that, he really didn’t want to know what the nicer hotels would charge. And like hell he was getting back on those miserably clogged streets until he’d had some time to relax. They retreated to their room, and Dean started unpacking their weapons while Sam - apparently in better spirits now that he’d gotten a laugh at Dean’s expense - pulled up the latest news on the case.

“Hey,” Sam said suddenly, and Dean put down the shotgun he’d been loading. “Get this. There was another death late last night. Guy named Lon Tremblay.”

He turned the laptop so Dean could see: _SECOND GRUESOME GOOGLE DEATH IN THREE DAYS_ , screamed the headline. “Damn,” Dean muttered. “Same M.O.?”

Sam shook his head. “Not exactly. The police managed to keep this one quieter, but it still sounds pretty hinky. Tremblay was bashed through a window and trampled to death.”

“Trampled?” Dean repeated in surprise.

“By hooves,” Sam said. “At a different Google building about four miles away from the first one.”

“Well that’s weird,” Dean muttered. “I was kinda thinking angry ghost, y’know, flinging the statue around or something, but four miles is a pretty big jump. And where the hell does a horse fit in?”

“Beats me,” Sam said. He picked up Dean’s newest Fed badge and slung it at him. “Let’s go find out.”

*           *           *

Two hours later, Dean was ready to punch something. He and Sam were walking across the broad terraced lawn in between four office buildings at the northernmost end of the Google campus, hoping to steal a look at the crime scene despite having been politely but firmly stonewalled by the receptionist in the lobby. “‘I’m sorry’,” Dean said in a high-pitched imitation of the receptionist’s voice. “Sorry my ass,” he added in his own voice. “If she was really sorry she’d’ve helped us, not told us to talk to a lawyer in sixteen different ways.”

“She’s just doing her job, Dean,” Sam said. He was looking out over the lawn, eyes squinted nearly shut against the bright California sunlight. They’d arrived, after fighting through more bumper-to-bumper traffic, in the middle of the lunch rush, men and women swarming among the four buildings with plates of food in hand. There were even a couple food trucks parked on the broad patio in front of the buildings, each with long lines of employees waiting for their orders. Dean’s mouth had watered just to see it, even though they’d grabbed lunch at a burger joint before coming.

It was more than a little strange to be here, in the supposedly magical world of Google. With the way the media always talked about the company, Dean had sort of expected futuristic glass-domed buildings housing sentient robots, with the human employees lounging in ball pits or skidding down slides or getting massages. In reality, though, this part of campus didn’t look much different from most other office complexes Dean had seen in his life. The only indicators that these buildings belonged to one of the most successful technology companies in the world were the outdoor furniture painted bright Google colors, the massive wall of LEDs flashing psychedelic patterns backing the walkway up to the lobby entrance, and the fact that every so often he or Sam had to sidestep someone riding a colorful bicycle. Oh, and the giant luxury buses that circled the parking lot, even now in the middle of the workday.

Even the people didn’t fit what he’d expected: instead of mostly twentysomething white and Asian guys wearing jeans and hoodies, people of all ages and races roamed the wide lawn, dressed in everything from, yes, jeans and t-shirts to button-downs and slacks to long bohemian dresses and pencil skirts. Dean and Sam were the only ones wearing full suits, though, and they were attracting more than a few sideways looks. It probably didn’t help that the whole campus seemed to be aware of what had happened - there was a subdued nature to the hustle and bustle, people talking in quieter voices than normal and shooting glances toward the building where the dead man had been found. Unfamiliar men in suits meant cops, meant that despite the media reporting the death as “under mysterious circumstances” rather than a murder, there was something here to investigate.

One woman caught Dean’s eye, and he shifted a little to hide his frown. “Hey,” he said quietly. “Don’t look now, but there’s a chick who’s been staring at us for like a minute straight.”

Sam’s expression went blank and he shifted a little, taking a side walkway instead of continuing up the main path toward the far end of the complex. Dean followed, keeping his eyes on Sam and the woman in his peripheral vision as he climbed the wide terraced steps. The new path let Sam turn naturally in the woman’s direction; he kept his face toward Dean, but his eyes tracked over to where the woman still stood about forty feet away—

His mouth dropped open and his eyes widened. The woman jerked like she’d been stung, then spun and took off running for the nearest building. Sam took off as well, his long legs carrying him halfway up the terrace before Dean even realized what was happening.

_Shit_.

Dean ran after them, cursing the Fed monkey suit under his breath for how it kept him from stretching his legs as much as he needed to keep up with Sam. The woman darted into the building past a group of people coming out at the same time, but the door swung shut behind her and Sam barely managed to snag the handle before it latched. He hauled it open, glancing over his shoulder for Dean before plunging inside.

Dean reached the door a couple of seconds later, just in time to slide in behind another group of engineers. The door opened onto a packed cafeteria, but sometimes having Sasquatch for a brother was handy because Sam stood taller than almost everyone there. Dean spotted his shaggy hair bouncing as he darted between people toward the far side of the room, and fought his way through the crowd after him. He got several odd looks as he ran through the dining room, but nobody tried to stop him. Across the room, Sam turned down a hallway and Dean lost sight of him for a few seconds; spotted him again when Dean reached the corner himself.  

The hall stretched most of the length of the building away from the cafeteria, lined on the right by doors and glass walls, and more doors and side hallways on the left. The woman was nowhere in sight. Sam, standing at an intersection a little ways along the hall, flicked Dean a glance, acknowledging that he’d lost her. By silent agreement he started forward along the right wall while Dean walked along the left, peering through doors and down halls. Most of the rooms looked like little conference rooms, each holding a small table with a couple of chairs and a big TV screen mounted to the wall. Partway down one of the side halls, though, Dean spotted a closed door, and though the narrow window beside it was mostly frosted, Dean could see sneakered feet standing near the table. He collected Sam with a look, then in one sharp move pushed down the handle and swung the door open.

The mystery woman jumped back, nearly tripping over a chair. Now that he wasn’t trying to pretend he hadn’t noticed her, Dean got his first good look at her. She was around Sam’s age - early thirties, maybe - with sharp cheekbones, long blond hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, and an athletic build under jeans and a green T-shirt decorated with some kind of circuit pattern. Her green eyes widened in terror as Dean stepped into the room, Sam behind him. Dean had his mouth open to ask her why she’d run when Sam said, his voice oddly nervous, “Uh… Hey, Katrina.”

“Hey, Sam,” she answered in an equally nervous voice. Her hands were behind her back, at first glance steadying her against the chair she’d almost tripped over, but then Dean saw the flash of light under her fingers.

He reached forward and plucked the phone from her hand before she could react. “Who’re you calling?” he asked, mock-polite, though he could see she’d already managed to dial 9-1.

“Ghostbusters,” she shot back, then bit her lip and looked between them uneasily. “So, um. Is this the part where you kill me?”

Dean had been keeping Sam in his peripheral vision, trying to gauge how his brother knew the woman, so he saw the words hit him like a gut punch. Dean shifted a little to put himself between Sam and the woman - Katrina? - and said, “Whoa, whoa. No one’s killing anyone, okay?”

“Right,” she said, her voice sharp and bitter and pained. “Lonty just died of _natural causes_.”

It took Dean a second to process the nickname into the name of the dead guy - Lon Tremblay, Lon T, Lonty - but Sam was already saying, in his best earnest nice-guy voice, “Actually, we’re here to find whoever killed him.”

Incredulity replaced the fear in her expression. “Oh, right, because serial killers solving murders in their spare time is a thing that happens in real life.”

Sam’s jaw worked and he dug his thumb into his palm again. Before she could say anything else, Dean interjected, “Okay, hold on, back up.” He pointed at the woman. “I don’t even _know_ you. What’s with the serial killer bullshit?”

Sam blew out a breath. “Right,” he said. “Uh, Dean, this is Katrina Aslanova. She was a friend of—of Jessica’s, back at Stanford.” Dean would have bet anything that Sam had almost said _a friend of mine_. “Trina, this is my brother Dean.”

Dean resisted the urge to clap a hand over his eyes. The absolute last thing they needed right now was a college friend of Sam’s getting involved, but he should have expected it. They were only a few miles from Palo Alto, and of course Google would have hired Stanford’s best and brightest.

Katrina eyed him. “I, uh, don’t feel like ‘nice to meet you’ is appropriate under the circumstances,” she said, and her voice was almost dry enough to hide the fear in it.

Dean sighed. “Why, exactly, do you think we’re serial killers?”

“Uh,” she said, “maybe because a few years back you guys made the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list after you went around shooting up restaurants and banks and stuff?”

Dean blinked. Shit, he’d forgotten about that, though Sam’s expression suggested he hadn’t. Sam said, “That wasn’t us, Trina, I swear.”

She gave him a flat look. “I saw the news reports, Sam. Everybody did. You don’t look _that_ different with longer hair.”

“It was a couple assholes trying to frame us,” Dean said irritably. “They found real good doppelgangers, but it wasn’t us. I mean, those guys died. We’re right here, aren’t we?”

Katrina looked between them uneasily. “That’s what Becky and Zach kept saying - that it was someone who looked like you, just like they claimed it was someone who looked like you who committed all those murders Zach was in trouble for way back when.”

Something flickered across Sam’s face, there and gone almost too fast to register, but Dean knew his brother. The fact that someone was still standing up for them meant more to Sam than he wanted to admit. Sam said earnestly, “They’re telling the truth, Trina. I know what it looks like, but I swear it wasn’t us. We’re here to help.”

Dean opened his mouth to speak but Sam flicked him a glance. Katrina was staring at Sam, her expression uneasy. Sam continued, “Just… give us three days, Trina, okay? Three days, and we’ll stop whoever’s killing people around here and get out of your hair.”

“Right,” Katrina said dryly. “You’ll stop the murders by leaving, and then I’ll be an accomplice. Unless you kill me.”

Sam ran a hand over his mouth, looking frustrated. Dean stepped in. “Look, Katrina,” he said. “We’re not going to kill you, right now or ever. So yeah, you can call the cops after we walk out of here, and tell them we were here. _If_ they believe you - ‘cause, remember, the imposters died in police custody so officially we’re dead - and they come after us, we’ll be gone. But whoever’s killing people here’s going to keep at it. More of your coworkers are gonna die. Or you wait three days, and if the murders don’t stop, _then_ you can call the cops.”

“You’ll still be gone,” she pointed out, but he could see the hesitation in her face.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “But that’s gonna be true whether you wait or not. Better to let us stop the murders first, right?”

Katrina wrapped her arms around herself, looking small and scared. Sam’s hand moved like he was going to reach out to her, but he stopped the gesture before she could see and freak out. Dean waited, willing her to be smart. She’d gone to Stanford, she worked at freaking _Google_ , she ought to be smart enough to see what her options were here.

“Trina, please,” Sam said gently. He’d put on his best puppy-dog face and was doing that thing where he somehow managed not to look like six feet four inches and two hundred pounds of pure muscle.

She glanced up at him, then looked away. “Dammit, Sam, don’t _do_ that,” she said, her voice pleading.

Sam blinked, which only made him look even more like a sad puppy. “Do what?”

“That,” she said, but the corners of her mouth pulled up into a wobbly smile for just a moment. Sam responded with a hesitant smile of his own, and finally, thank God, she nodded. Her mouth was tight and she looked about half a second away from bursting into tears, but she nodded. “Okay,” she whispered. “Three days. I’m going to hate myself for the rest of ever, but…” She swallowed and shuddered.

Sam looked like he wanted to hug her or something, but all he said was, “Thank you, Trina. I promise we’ll find who’s doing this.”

She didn’t answer. Sam started to turn to leave, but Dean caught his eye. He wasn’t real happy with the idea of pushing Katrina when she was so clearly upset, but she’d apparently known the second victim and if they couldn’t get through the receptionist and Google’s lawyer army, she might be their only source of information. Sam grimaced, but didn’t protest, so Dean said gently to Katrina, “Can you answer some questions for us? If we’re gonna stop the murders we need information, and the receptionist wouldn’t talk.”

Her eyes darted between them. “What do you want to know?”

Dean hooked one of the room’s three chairs out from under the table and sat in it, setting Katrina’s phone on the table at his elbow. Following his lead, Sam sat down as well, and after another hesitation, Katrina took the last chair. Dean fought the urge to lean forward; it would probably just spook her. “You knew the second vic, Lon Tremblay?”

“He’s my partner on the late shift. ...Was my partner.” She pressed a hand to her mouth.

“Late shift?” Sam asked.

She nodded. “We’re part of the security team, the 24/7 SOC. We—”

“Hold on,” Dean interrupted. “A sock?”

“SOC,” she repeated. “Security operations center. We monitor Google’s networks for internal and external threats.” She took a deep breath, seeming to steady herself with the familiar topic. “Mountain View - our team - covers first and second shifts, then the team in Zurich handles third shift. Lonty and I are on late shift this quarter. We start at two PM and stay until midnight. I’m only here this early today because of the police—and I couldn’t sit at home alone, not after that.”

“What happened last night?” Sam asked gently. “When did you last see, uh, Lonty?”

“He was fine when I left,” Katrina said. “I go to the gym after work - the gym over in CL5, where—” She broke off and swallowed.

Dean took the moment to ask, “CL5?”

“Crittenden building five,” she clarified, and waved a hand vaguely. “Critt only has four buildings but for some reason there’s no CL1.” At their confused looks she added, “This is the Crittenden campus. Critt. We’re in CL2 right now. I work in CL3.”

“...Right,” Dean said. He remembered that the street they’d turned onto to get here had been called Crittenden; given the size of the Google campus it made sense that they’d have different names for the different areas. “So, you went to the gym? Did Tremblay go with you?”

Katrina shook her head. “He sometimes comes with me, and sometimes goes for a run on the trails behind the buildings. He likes doing it at night. Says it’s peaceful.” She swallowed. “He went running last night. I left the gym at around one AM and went home. I didn’t even know anything had happened until my boss called me this morning.”

She was looking down at her hands, worrying at a pad of sticky notes from the little stack of office supplies in the middle of the table, so she didn’t see the glance Dean shot Sam at that. “Did you see anything strange?” Sam asked. “Anything you can’t explain?”

Katrina’s brow furrowed, and Dean added, “Anything at all - weird noises, weird smells, cold spots—”

“Cold spots?” she repeated doubtfully.

Sam spread his hands. “Anything unusual, no matter how small.”

She shook her head. “Not that I can think of. It was just… a normal night.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and this time Sam did reach over and take one of her hands in his. She clung to his fingers for a few seconds before drawing in a shaky breath. “Though, uh…”

“What?” Sam prompted gently.

“The horse was missing,” Katrina said, and Dean and Sam glanced at each other in surprise. “The horse statue out in the field by the driveway,” she clarified. “When I came in today, I noticed it was gone.” Her mouth quirked. “There’s so many statues all over campus, you mostly don’t notice them after a while, but the news on Saturday said someone used part of a statue—” She swallowed, her grip tightening on Sam’s fingers. “You kinda start paying attention after that.”

“Right,” Dean said. He traded a look with Sam; he could tell his brother was thinking the same thing he was. “Okay, Katrina. We’ll get out of your hair now.”

“Thank you,” Sam added. He squeezed her hand, then let go and stood up. Dean followed him, and they headed out of the building.

Dean waited until they’d reached the parking lot to say, “So, college friend, huh?”

Sam’s shoulders hunched. “That was a long time ago.”

“Sam—”

“We should look for that statue,” Sam said brusquely. “The police report said Tremblay was trampled to death by a horse’s hooves. It sounds like the statues are the connection.”

Dean sighed, but let him deflect the conversation. “Yeah. She said in the field by the driveway?”

“Yeah.” Sam squinted against the sunlight, then pointed. “That’s the driveway.”

“Lead the way,” Dean said.

*           *           *

It didn’t take them long to find the empty cement platform where a statue had clearly once stood, up on a hill just west of the complex’s main driveway. There was a discreet little ring of police tape around it, not readily visible from the road - apparently the police knew about the statue as well. Dean stepped over it to crouch next to the platform, running a hand over the fresh gouges along the edges, while Sam had stopped a few feet away to peer at deep hoofprints in the dirt.

“So what do you think?” Dean asked, pushing to his feet and dusting off his hands. “Something bringing statues to life?”

“Sounds like it,” Sam said. He turned, eyes tracking the hoofprints as they joined a pedestrian path that ran alongside the buildings toward the bay to the north. “The horse wasn’t running when it first got down off the platform,” he continued thoughtfully. “The steps are too close together.” He paced away, following the tracks, though he was careful to stay to the side in the grass where he wouldn’t leave tracks of his own.

“Katrina said the vic was running on the trails behind the buildings,” Dean said, jumping off the platform to follow him. He squinted past Sam toward the back of the campus, though he couldn’t see much through the buildings.

“There’s walking paths all over up there,” Sam said. “It’s some kind of nature preserve.”

“Isn’t it a swamp?” Dean asked. “What the hell are they preserving, mosquitos?”

Sam shrugged but didn’t answer. They followed the path, and the hoofprints, to where it intersected the parking lot at the back of the Crittenden campus. The entire back of the closest building had been roped off with police tape, and past the tape Dean could see a row of shattered windows that opened onto a room full of gym equipment. Sam nudged him, and Dean turned to see him pointing across the parking lot to where more police tape marked an otherwise innocuous section of grassy hill rising up behind a row of parked cars.

“So the horse comes to life and crosses the field in no particular hurry,” Sam said. “It gets over to the nature paths, and, what, sees the vic?”

“It starts chasing him.” Dean followed the logic, turning back to the shattered gym windows. “He makes a run for the gym because he thinks Katrina’s there—”

“—but she’s already gone home,” Sam said, “and the horse catches up to him when he’s trying to get inside.”

“Damn,” Dean said, and winced. “Killer statues, man.”

“Not the weirdest thing we’ve heard,” Sam said dryly.

Dean snorted. “Ghost?”

“Maybe,” Sam said, but he was frowning as he pulled their EMF reader from a pocket and switched it on, its antenna pointed at the gym. It immediately started squealing, loud enough that they both winced and leaned away. Sam turned it off again, his eyebrows up. “Well, that was…”

“Something,” Dean agreed.

“Something big,” Sam said. “Powerful.”

“You gettin’ scared on me now, Sammy?” Dean teased.

Sam rolled his eyes. “Shut up.”

Dean grinned, though he didn’t think Sam was fooled. Whatever this was, with an EMF reading like that, it wasn’t going to go down easy. He and Sam had a lot of work to do.


	3. Chapter 3

“Jesus,” Dean muttered. “It’s eleven PM, why are there still people here?”

Sam followed his gaze up to where a light shone in an upper-floor office window. “Trina said her team has people working until midnight. Maybe other teams do, too.”

They stood on the broad lawn between the four office buildings where Katrina worked and her colleague had been murdered last night. This late at night, the parking lot was mostly empty of cars, though dozens of those huge luxury buses stood in neat rows across the asphalt. A handful of windows scattered around the four buildings were still lit up, including several in the building where Katrina had said she worked, but at least no one was out and walking around.

After examining the platform where the missing horse statue had once stood and the gym where Tremblay had died, they’d returned to their hotel room to figure out their next steps. Sam had taken the laptop and gone to find a Peet’s Coffee (“ _dude, I haven’t had Peet’s in years, shut up”_ ), while Dean swung by the police station and the morgue. At least in the middle of the afternoon traffic had finally lightened, but it was still much heavier than Dean was used to and he’d spent the day wound up with worry that some idiot was going to sideswipe or rear-end his baby.

The cops hadn’t found any connection between the two victims other than that they both worked at Google, though they did confirm to Dean that the missing horse statue had been found in the gym near Tremblay’s body, covered in blood. “No idea how anyone could’ve got it there, though,” the cop had said incredulously. “That thing was solid iron - not the kind of thing you pick up and swing around like a baseball bat.” The coroner didn’t have anything, either - no missing organs or unnatural wounds, just a couple of hideously mangled bodies.

When Dean picked up Sam, his brother told him that he hadn’t been able to find anything either. No recent violent or unexplained deaths, no cult phenomena that could explain why two statues four miles apart had suddenly turned murderous. With no leads except that the deaths had both happened at Google offices late at night, they had decided to spend the night patrolling the Google campus in the hope of catching their spook in the act.

Problem was, the Google campus was huge. The main campus alone sprawled across dozens of buildings over twenty-six acres between Highway 101 to the south, the San Francisco Bay to the north, and the old military Moffett Airfield to the east. Almost all of that was Google-owned, though a handful of the buildings belonged to other companies, while the huge, public Shoreline Amphitheatre concert park took up most of the northernmost part. Crittenden, the sub-complex where Lon Tremblay had died, stood at the northeasternmost point of the campus, while the headquarters buildings - “the Googleplex,” Sam had said in a skeptical tone after looking it up - stood at the very center of the area. Meanwhile, the campus where the first victim had died was in a separate area altogether, to the southeast on the other side of the massive 101 highway, and Sam had found at least four more Google complexes stretching northwest along the peninsula.

They’d finally decided to stick with the main Google campus for now. It was more than enough for them to cover as it was, and whatever their spook was, it seemed to have left the southeast complex to come up to the main campus. It was an open question whether it would stay there, continue moving northward across the bay, or head up the peninsula to the northwest, but Dean and Sam couldn’t be in all of those places at once. So they’d parked the Impala in a back corner of the Crittenden parking lot, loaded up on rock-salt shotguns, regular pistols, salt, holy oil, and a handful of other things that might come in handy, and set out on foot.

“We should’ve asked Katrina about those other statues she mentioned,” Sam said. “Might’ve helped us narrow down where to look.”

Dean snorted. “She probably would’ve just thought we were looking for our next murder weapon.”

Sam’s jaw tightened and he looked away. Dean mentally kicked himself - the last thing Sam needed was to be reminded _again_ that his former friend thought he was a serial killer. He glanced around, hoping for a distraction, then his eyes fell on the row of brightly-colored bikes lined up neatly in front of the sidewalk. He grinned and elbowed Sam.

“No,” Sam said immediately, in his spoilsport voice. “Dean—”

“Who’s gonna care?” Dean said. “C’mon, Sammy, how many people get to say they rode Google bikes?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “All eight thousand local Google employees, for one.”

Dean ignored him, choosing a bike and swinging a leg over the seat. “Besides,” he said smugly, “we’ve got the whole campus to patrol. We can cover a lot more range on bikes than on foot.”

“Or we could use the car,” Sam grumped.

“Tremblay got attacked where you couldn’t see him from the road,” Dean retorted. “They’ve got these bikes for a reason, Sammy. Come on, live a little!”

Sam glared at him, but Dean could see the way his eyes cut over to the bikes, the way he chewed his lower lip. Dean waited, grinning, and finally Sam sighed and grabbed a bike of his own.

*           *           *

Ten minutes later Sam coasted into the parking lot behind the Googleplex, letting go of the handlebars long enough to throw his arms up in victory. Dean, behind him by about three seconds, shot him a mock-scowl, which Sam took as his cue to bike in a lazy circle around Dean. “Looks like you’re out of practice, old man,” Sam crowed.

“Shut up,” Dean said. “This bike’s tires are going flat.”

“Excuses, excuses,” Sam smirked. He pulled the bike up next to a flight of stairs cut into the hill that led up to the sleek glass buildings of the Googleplex and climbed off. “I think you’ve just been spending too much time with your Japanese cartoons and not enough time in the gym.”

Dean pulled up next to him in time to punch him in the arm. “Last time _you_ said you were in the gym, I saw you sitting on the weight bench texting that Eileen chick,” he teased. Sam headed up the stairs, and Dean followed on his heels, adding, “I mean, I guess that could lead to a certain _type_ of workout, but—”

“Shut up!” Sam protested over his shoulder. “She was just asking if I knew anything about killing lamias—”

“Suuure,” Dean drawled. “Because you’re totally the expert on— _oof!_ ” Sam had stopped abruptly at the top of the steps and Dean smacked into his back. “Sam?”

Sam blew out his breath in a little huff. “Nothing,” he said. “Just…” He gestured and Dean stepped around him to look.

A freaking Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton stood maybe a hundred yards away, mouth open and teeth gleaming in the light of the moon and a handful of streetlamps. Dean’s heart slammed into his throat before he realized it wasn’t moving, just posed in the middle of a garden like a particularly bizarre and oversized lawn gnome. “Holy shit,” he muttered under his breath.

“No kidding,” Sam answered, and they traded a shaky grin at their own gullibility. “I think that’s Stan,” he continued.

Dean blinked. “It has a name? I mean, okay, Google has a T-Rex skeleton on its front lawn, sure, but they named it _Stan_?”

Sam shrugged. “I saw pictures when I was researching,” he said. “Although all the pictures showed it covered in pink plastic flamingos.”

Dean took another look at the statue. No pink flamingos were in sight, though the T-Rex _was_ sporting a proportionately-enormous pair of pink heart-eye sunglasses balanced across its nose, and a massive peace-sign necklace around its neck. “Maybe they took off when Stan turned into a hippy,” Dean said, and grinned.

Sam snorted and started walking again. They were in the middle of the Googleplex now, a collection of four irregularly-shaped buildings at the heart of the Google campus. Paved walkways, split in half by painted lines with markers for “pedestrians” and “bikes” on either side, ran through the lawn, and patios with more brightly-colored furniture spread out from the buildings. Dean kept Sam in his peripheral vision as they split up, Sam circling counterclockwise around the near edge of the ring of buildings, while Dean went left along one of the patios. That meant Sam would have to cross near Stan to get back, and Dean was perfectly happy to leave _that_ creepy statue to his brother.

There were a handful of lights on in these buildings as well, but the Winchesters were the only ones outside, which suited Dean just fine. The fewer people out and about, the more likely their mystery spook would choose a Winchester as its target. Not that Dean was particularly thrilled with the idea of being chased by a rampaging statue, but better him than some poor innocent bastard.

He could see what Katrina’d meant about noticing the statues, though - they were _everywhere_. Mostly decorative stuff, artsy flowers or stylized dancing figures, but a few things, like the T-Rex, were distinctly Google. As Dean approached the parking lot on the opposite side of the complex from the one they’d arrived in, he spotted another cartoon robot like the one that had killed the first victim. This one was green instead of white, and held what looked like a giant marshmallow between its two stubby arms. Dean gave it a wide berth, then went to pick out a new bike from another cluster on this side of the buildings.

Sam joined him a minute later, eyes wide in the darkness, and Dean only didn’t tease him about it because he was pretty sure Sam’d seen him jump when Sam had appeared from the shadows. Clouds were rolling in across the sky, blotting out the light from the half-moon, and the pillars of light from the lamps in the parking lot only made it harder to see in the patches of darkness.

Sam grabbed a bike of his own, then they biked in silence down the driveway and across the street to the next set of buildings. They pedaled through the parking lot, dodging speed bumps and the occasional pothole, squinting into the shadows for any sign of unnatural activity. There were more creepy statues here: a massive version of the round cartoon robot leaning out over the entrance to one of the buildings, its eyes blinking through a cycling series of colors; a pair of enormous stick-figure humanoids walking down a broad path between buildings. None of them showed any signs of life, though, so the Winchesters kept going.

They followed the side street, its sidewalks lined with huge trees whose branches left the street little more than a black tunnel, the bikes’ tires whispering over the pavement. Then down a different street, past more yawning parking lots that even now, past midnight, held a handful of cars. It was nearly silent, except for the susurrus of their tires, the hum of cars passing on the 101 to the south, and the occasional call of a night bird.

This street ended at a corner, and they circled the buildings along either axis of the corner before following the bend of the street back up toward the Googleplex. They’d almost reached the main road when Dean heard a crunching noise. He hissed to Sam and they pulled up onto the sidewalk together, dismounting the bikes, ready to go for their weapons. Dean strained his ears, listening; could see Sam doing the same thing, squinting into the darkness, trying to see—

Light flashed and an engine growled not thirty feet away, and Dean nearly jumped out of his skin as a car pulled out of the driveway in front of them. It was a sleek German thing, its engine roaring as its driver took advantage of the empty streets to cut loose. Dean swore under his breath and tried to get his heart to stop pounding. Sam caught his eye and flashed him a rather shaky grin and eye roll, and Dean snorted. “This would be less annoying if we knew what we were looking for,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” Sam agreed. “Every time we pass by something that isn’t a tree or a building I think it’s gonna jump at me.”

“Why do they have so many statues, anyway?” Dean groused. “Why not have nice imitation Warhols or Picassos or something?”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “You know who Andy Warhol is?”

“Shut up,” Dean retorted. “I know—”

A huge shape loomed in the darkness maybe twenty feet behind Sam. Two deep red lights like embers glowed six feet off the ground, and just beneath them the dim moonlight flashed off sharp teeth. Stan the T-Rex skeleton stepped out of the shadows, its eyelights fixing on Dean and Sam. The peace-sign necklace still swung from its neck, and the ridiculous heart-eye sunglasses perched precariously on its nose.

Something must have shown on Dean’s face because Sam turned around, already reaching for his gun. He spotted Stan and froze in shock. “Dean—!”

Dean hauled out his rock-salt shotgun. “Move!” he yelled to Sam.

The T-Rex lowered its head and roared a challenge, the sound deafening despite the thing having neither lungs nor vocal cords. Dean fired the shotgun. The beast’s head jerked back - but then it roared again and leaped for them.

Dean went left into the street, Sam went right into the tree-lined berm between the sidewalk and the parking lot, and the T-Rex landed between them, crushing their abandoned bikes flat. Dean hit the ground in a roll, came back to his feet already aiming the shotgun. He let loose with the other barrel, hoping that he’d just missed the first shot, but this time he heard the salt pellets clatter against Stan’s plaster bones. The beast snarled and started to lunge for him, but Sam’s pistol barked twice and Dean saw chips of plaster fly off its skull. It spun toward Sam, teeth snapping, and Sam barely flung himself backward in time.

_Christ it’s fast_ , Dean thought. He didn’t have time to reload the shotgun, so he shoved it back into his coat and reached for his own handgun. Sam staggered backward away from another bite and tripped on the uneven ground of the berm, falling on his ass with a grunt of pain. _Shit_. Dean darted forward, around the T-Rex’s side, trying to get its attention on himself and away from Sam. Its head was low, its jaws wide as it snapped at Sam, and Dean didn’t want to fire, not from this angle in the dark where he’d risk hitting his brother.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Ugly!” He drew his arm out from his jacket, not with his handgun but with a road flare. He twisted the cap and struck the flare to life, fire hissing and sizzling in his hand before he flung it at the dinosaur. Stan howled, in rage or pain or maybe just annoyance, but it took two quick steps back from the flare and Dean ran past it to his brother.

Sam was already pushing to his feet. “It doesn’t like fire?” he panted.

“Guess not,” Dean said - but the T-Rex was already recovering. It stepped around the flare where it burned on the sidewalk and turned those burning red eyes on Dean and Sam, creepy and distorted over the heart-eye sunglasses. “Run!”

Dean shoved at his brother and they took off running, over the berm, through the line of trees, and out onto the broad parking lot. The lot was eerily dark; the streetlights that had illuminated it only a minute ago had apparently shorted out or otherwise been suppressed by Stan’s presence. Behind him Dean heard Stan crash into the trees, bellowing in frustration, and he dared a glance over his shoulder. The T-Rex had had the same trouble on the uneven hill that Sam had, and had staggered against one of the trees. But even as Dean watched, it pushed upright and began to run after them. And its legs were a hell of a lot longer than theirs.

“This way!” Sam hissed, and hauled Dean to the side, through a group of parked cars. On the other side of the cars, a pair of huge white-and-black shuttle buses sat nose-to-tail, and Sam led Dean through the narrow gap between them. The moment they were on the other side he juked hard to the right for a few steps, putting the bus between them and Stan’s line of sight, and then kept going in a straight line across the parking lot.

They reached the other side of the parking lot, emerging onto the same dark tree-lined street they’d biked down earlier, and Dean realized suddenly that he couldn’t hear Stan anymore. He turned around, squinting into the darkness, but with no moonlight and no streetlight, he was damn near blind. He could barely make out the broad trunks of the trees lining the sidewalk, much less anything beyond them. “Sammy?” he whispered. “See anything?”

“Nope,” Sam breathed. He was moving forward still, away from the parking lot where they’d last seen the dinosaur, tugging Dean along with a hand on his arm. “We need to get someplace with working lights, we’re not gonna be able to do much if we can’t even see it.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Dean whispered back. “Do you—”

A thud of a heavy plaster foot on pavement was all the warning they had. Stan leaped out from between a pair of trees, crossing the thirty feet to where they stood in an instant. Dean yelled and shoved Sam away from him; they staggered in different directions and the T-Rex landed between them. Dean took off running, peripherally aware of Sam doing the same. By unspoken agreement they headed for the nearest building, which turned out to be the one they’d passed earlier with the huge robot statue leaning over the door. Its eyes glowed red, an unsettling reflection of Stan’s unnaturally-burning eyes, then sparked and went dark as Stan followed Dean and Sam across the building’s parking lot.

It caught up to them in a few long strides, coming up alongside them and then angling inward, forcing them away from the building. _Shit shit shit_ , Dean thought frantically. The thing was smart enough to herd them, to keep them out in the open where it would have an easier time picking them off. He poured on more speed, his lungs aching with the strain, and felt Sam doing the same beside him.

They dodged through a pair of parked delivery trucks, around a couple of trees lining the walkway beside the parking lot, then Dean grabbed Sam by the arm and hauled him around the corner of the next building over, trying to get out of the dinosaur’s line of sight. A door was set into the glass-paneled wall of the building and Dean banged into it, tugging hard on the handle, but it was locked and he didn’t have time to try to kick through it. Stan rounded the corner, swinging wide before recovering its balance, and Sam yanked Dean into motion again half a second before Stan’s heavy skull crashed into the door where he’d been standing.

Glass cracked and shattered, and if Dean hadn’t been breathless with fear and exertion he’d have laughed at the sight of the plaster dinosaur skeleton with its head stuck in a hole in the glass paneling. As it was, he flipped Stan the bird before following Sam further into the cluster of buildings.

A broad pedestrian path cut through the lawn here, giving them plenty of room to run but nowhere to hide. They were running flat-out now, and Dean strained his eyes for anything that could help them, any building they could run into, but every building would be locked this late and while there were lots of decorative trees and lawn furniture around, there wasn’t anything big enough or sturdy enough to provide any protection from a rampaging T-Rex.

_Dammit_. Glass and metal screamed and the T-Rex roared as it dragged its head free of the building. Sam shoved Dean off the path toward a copse of trees in the lawn of yet another building, and they barely made it through before Stan’s thundering footsteps caught up to them. The dinosaur swerved around the copse, which bought them a few precious seconds, but Dean wasn’t sure how much good that would do. Their weapons had done nothing to it, except maybe piss it off more, and if they couldn’t get into a building then it was just a matter of time before Stan caught up to one of them.

But they couldn’t just stand there twiddling their thumbs, either. Dean caught Sam’s eye and panted, “Get one of those doors open!”

Sam nodded once and swerved away from him toward the building. This one was L-shaped, with two doors under a pillared entryway in the bend of the L. The pillars weren’t narrow enough to keep Stan out completely, but hopefully they’d provide cover long enough for Sam to break open one of the doors. Dean turned, drawing his handgun and snapping a shot at Stan’s head to get its attention.

It roared and lunged, and Dean tried to dodge but the thing was too close, too fast, and its head slammed into him, flinging him twenty feet away onto the grass. The impact knocked the wind out of him and he lay stunned for a second, gasping. He felt the ground shake as the T-Rex planted itself over him, its big feet on either side of his legs, and its head reared back to strike.

“Dean!” Sam shouted. His gun barked and plaster chips flew from Stan’s skull. The T-Rex swung its head around to glare at Sam. Dean wanted to yell at him to keep going, that getting into a building was more important and Dean could handle this, but he still hadn’t recovered his breath and it was all he could do to shove himself out from under Stan while the dinosaur was distracted. It was hesitating, seeming torn between attacking Sam in response to the gunfire and finishing off Dean while he was down.

Then Sam reached into his jacket and drew out his own road flare.

Stan bellowed a furious roar, loud enough that Dean clapped his hands over his ears on sheer reflex, and lunged. Sam, also momentarily stunned by the roar, couldn’t get out of the way in time. The T-Rex’s head snapped out, twisting sideways, and its massive jaws closed around Sam’s hips.

Sam cried out in pain as the dinosaur lifted him into the air, its head and jaw making birdlike snapping motions to get a better grip on him. “Sam!” Dean yelled, and shoved to his feet, scrabbling desperately for his gun even though he had no idea what he was going to do, if he shot the skeleton the bullet was as likely to go through its empty bones and hit Sam, but he didn’t know what else—

A crack-hiss and a flare of brilliant light, and suddenly Stan howled. It flung Sam - and the flare he’d managed to light - through the air, tossing its head and staggering in the opposite direction. Sam hit the grass hard and rolled to a stop in a limp tangle of limbs, the flare tumbling from his hand.

“SAM!” Dean yelled again, but his brother didn’t move. He took a few steps toward Sam but Stan’s big head swung around, ember eyes glaring over those stupid heart sunglasses. Dean froze. He could run in the other direction, try to draw it away from Sam, but if Sam was hurt bad then Dean needed to get to him—

“Hey!” a woman’s voice shouted. Something plunked against the T-Rex’s nose and stuck there; it took a second for Dean to recognize it as a Nerf dart, the kind with the little suction cups on the end. Another dart pinged off Stan’s jaw, not sticking this time, and the dinosaur turned to look in the direction they were coming from.

Katrina Aslanova stood near the corner of the building maybe thirty feet away, a bulky plastic Nerf gun in each hand. She wore dark grey yoga pants, a skintight workout top with the Google logo across the chest, and running shoes, and her blond hair was pulled back in a braid. Her eyes were wide but determined as she pointed the Nerf gun in her left hand at the dinosaur. This gun spat a rapid-fire series of disks that bounced off Stan’s nose and flank, and it roared in aggravation.

Katrina caught Dean’s eye and jerked her head toward the building’s inner wall. Dean spotted a door set in the middle of the wall that had been propped slightly open, dim light glowing through the crack. Then Katrina fired another suction-cup dart at Stan from the other gun and called, “Hey, big guy! Come and get me!”

Stan didn’t hesitate, bellowing again as it took off across the lawn after her. She darted around the corner of the building out of sight, and Stan followed. Dean hesitated for an instant, torn between a reflexive instinct to help the civilian and an even more bone-deep need to make sure Sam was okay. _Ah, who am I kidding?_ he thought, and ran to Sam.

His brother was just starting to stir, arms pushing weakly at the grass, when Dean fell to his knees beside him. “Easy, Sammy,” he murmured. “Anything broken?”

“Dunno,” Sam gasped. He hissed in pain as Dean slid an arm under his shoulders and hauled him up off the ground. His hips and thighs were a mess of blood, torn denim, and shredded skin; Dean hadn’t thought Stan’s teeth would be that sharp but maybe whatever was animating the statue had thrown in a free filing service. At least there wasn’t so much blood that Dean had to worry about Sam’s femoral artery being severed. “Can you walk?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Sam grunted. He tried to move and almost fell; only Dean’s grip kept him upright.

_Dammit_. He needed to get Sam inside to safety and then get back out here to help Katrina. “Okay, let’s go,” Dean said. He tightened his grip on Sam and half-carried him toward the propped-open door. Somewhere not that far away Stan roared again and Dean’s stomach tightened, but he thought it had sounded more frustrated than victorious. _Hang on, Katrina,_ he thought.

Sam’s face was completely white and he was barely supporting his own weight by the time Dean got him up the single low concrete step and through the door. The room beyond looked like some kind of lobby or waiting room; there were a couch and a couple chairs in the near corner along with a little table covered in magazines, and a reception desk to the right. Dean was about to drop Sam into one of the chairs when a door he hadn’t noticed on the other side of the reception desk burst open and Katrina ran in.

She stopped short when she saw them, still holding the Nerf guns, panting with exertion and clear terror but uninjured. “Holy shit,” she said, her voice high and thready, her eyes fixing on Sam’s injuries.

“We need a first-aid kit,” Dean said to her. “This is an office building, right? Offices are supposed to have first-aid kits.”

She stared at him blankly. Dean was used to people reacting badly to their first encounter with the supernatural, but he - and Sam - didn’t have time for it right now. “Katrina!” he snapped. “Come on, focus!”

“I, uh,” she said, and swallowed hard. “What?”

“First-aid kit,” Dean said, motioning with his chin at Sam’s injuries.

“Right,” she said, swallowing again. She put the guns down on the reception desk and crossed the room to a door on the wall opposite Dean and Sam. “I can do you one better. This is a Wellness Center.”

“A what?” Dean asked.

“Onsite health services,” she explained, and opened the door. “Basically a doctor’s office. I, uh, don’t know what all they’ll have but it’s gonna be better than the wall kit.”

“Jesus,” Dean muttered. “A doctor’s office?” But he chivvied Sam into motion and they crossed the room to the door. Through it was, indeed, a neat little doctor’s visit room complete with patient table and cupboards full of medical supplies.

“Wow,” Sam said, his voice strained but clear. He seemed to be pulling himself together, and Dean let himself hope that maybe he wasn’t as badly hurt as he’d feared. Katrina followed them inside, her shoulders hunched, hugging herself nervously.

Dean managed to get Sam seated on the patient’s table, then he began rooting through the cupboards for bandages and other supplies. Behind him, he heard Katrina ask Sam, “Um… are you okay? —I mean, dumb question, but—”

“I’ll be fine,” Sam said, though the pain in his voice indicated otherwise. “Where’s the dinosaur?”

“Still outside somewhere,” she answered. “I got in through the door on the other side of the building.”

“How’d you lose him?” Dean asked, returning to the table with an armful of supplies. He dropped them on the little metal tray on top of a wheeled cart next to the table and got to work opening a sterile cleansing cloth.

“T-Rexes don’t corner well,” Katrina answered, and her mouth flickered in a nervous smile. “And I know this part of campus better than you guys do.”

“And you can get in the doors, apparently,” Dean added. He wrestled Sam’s jacket off, pushed his shirt out of the way, and peered at his injuries. “Dammit,” he muttered. “Sammy, get your pants off or this is gonna cut right in—”

“Dean!” Sam protested.

“What?” Dean demanded. “It’s already starting to swell, so either take ‘em off or I cut ‘em off.”

Sam scowled at him, his eyes darting over to where Katrina stood watching. Katrina looked confused for a second, then blinked, her cheeks flushing pink. “Oh,” she said, and turned around. “Sorry.”

Sam still didn’t make any move to shuck his jeans, though, so Dean reached for the big fabric scissors he’d found and started to push back Sam’s shirt again. Sam’s scowl deepened and he swatted Dean’s hands away, then took a deep breath, visibly bracing himself, and began peeling off his jeans. When he had to stop, eyes squeezing shut in pain as the bloody fabric tore wetly away from his wounds, Dean nudged his hands aside and used the scissors to finish the job.   

With the jeans out of the way, it was a lot easier to see the extent of Sam’s injuries. Most of the blood was coming from dozens of narrow but deep gouges in a ring around the muscle of his left thigh, both front and back, where the T-Rex’s teeth had torn through the fabric of his jeans. The heavy canvas of his jacket plus his shirt and undershirt had done better at protecting his hips and groin, though he was already developing a line of hideous bruises from a couple inches below his navel, up over his left hip, and back down toward his tailbone. Sam glanced down at the wounds once, then swallowed hard and looked away, digging his thumb into the old scar on the palm of his hand.

Dean hid a wince. Sam never talked about his time in the Cage with two pissed-off archangels, and for a while there he’d mostly been doing okay. But between the clusterfuck in Limbo and then the fiasco with Lucifer in the Bunker, Sam was taking mental body blows from the memories Death had once warned would kill him. Seeing his leg chewed up like so much raw meat couldn’t be helping his mental state.

Hoping to distract him, Dean said, “So, Katrina, how’d you find us, anyway?”

“Oh, um,” she said. She glanced over at them, but when her eyes found the bloody mess of Sam’s leg, she turned greenish and quickly looked away again. “The gym up at Critt is still closed, and anyway I don’t think I could go back there, since that’s where…” She swallowed. “Anyway. The gym in Building 46 is pretty decent, so I drove over here, but then I heard the gunshots and I thought…”

She trailed off, hugging herself more tightly. Sam, his eyes fixed firmly on the wall as Dean carefully cleaned grass and dirt from a particularly nasty gouge, said, “You thought someone else was in trouble.”

Katrina nodded. “I didn’t really know what to do, I was about to dial 911 when I heard the crash and the roaring and looked out the window. When I saw, um.” She gestured vaguely. “The, um. T-Rex. And you guys running. I just… I don’t even know why but I grabbed a couple of Nerf guns from the armory and ran outside.”

“The armory?” Dean repeated, surprised. “You have an _armory_ in here?”

“A Nerf armory,” she said.

“Why the hell would you have a Nerf armory in an office building?”

“Why the hell _wouldn’t_ you have a Nerf armory in an office building?” she replied, and almost managed to smile.

Dean shook his head and muttered, “Freakin’ techies.”

Somewhere outside, Stan the T-Rex roared again, and Sam’s mouth tightened. “Dammit,” he muttered. “We can’t just let him run around out there.”

“We can’t just let you bleed to death, either,” Dean retorted.

Sam scowled at him, not quite managing to hide a wince as he stretched out an arm to hook the little cart of supplies closer. “I can take care of this, Dean. You gotta at least make sure no one’s out there with it.”

“Oh, sure,” Dean groused. “We don’t know how to hurt it or even slow it down, but yeah, I’ll just go run around in the dark with the pissed-off T-Rex skeleton.” Sam gave him a look, and Dean rolled his eyes. “I know, I know. Saving people, yadda yadda. I’m going.”

“Here,” Katrina said, and Dean turned to see her holding out a colorful employee badge printed with her photo and name. “It’ll get you in the buildings. Just tap it on the badge reader next to the door.”

Dean blinked in surprise, then took the badge. “That’ll help,” he admitted. She gave him a shaky smile and went back to hugging herself.

He didn’t like this, at _all_ , but he liked the idea of leaving Stan loose to munch on some poor innocent bastard even less. He checked his guns, then checked Sam, who was gritting his teeth as he started cleaning another of the gouges in his leg but at least wasn’t about to pass out - or have a mental breakdown. Finally Dean turned to Katrina. “Hey,” he said, and her eyes snapped to him, wide and green and still very, very scared. “Stay with Sam, okay?” he said. “Help him if he needs it. Just do what he tells you and it’ll be okay. Got it?”

She nodded, biting her lip. Dean patted her on the shoulder, then clapped Sam on his uninjured knee before heading out the door to go face the T-Rex once again.


	4. Chapter 4

It only took Sam a few minutes to clean and bandage the wounds in his leg. They were more deep than wide, bloody and messy and painful but neither crippling nor fatal, and he taped them closed with butterfly bandages and wrapped his whole thigh with gauze. He almost asked for Katrina’s help with the ones on the back of his leg where he couldn’t see, but she still looked a little shocky and it wasn’t the first time he’d treated his own wounds by touch alone.

Aaaand maybe he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask the girl he’d had a crush on for months before he’d met Jess to help him treat wounds that close to his ass.

Still, Katrina _did_ look freaked out, and he needed to keep her from going into a total meltdown. “Hey,” he said quietly. “Good work out there, getting Stan off us.”

“Oh,” she said. “Um, thanks.” She was picking at the hem of her shirt, but she darted a quick glance at him. “I, um. Sam…” He waited, absently cleaning the streaks of blood that had run down his leg, and finally she said, “Sam, that was… That was _Stan._ The _dinosaur skeleton_. The _fake_ dinosaur skeleton.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. A decade of hunting experience told him that the best thing he could do for her right now was to be perfectly calm, perfectly matter-of-fact.

She waved her hands helplessly. “... _How?!_ ”

“We think it’s being animated by a spirit of some kind,” Sam said. “We haven’t figured out what kind of spirit yet, but now that we’ve seen it in action we’ll have a better idea of what to look for in the lore.”

Katrina stared at him.

“Trina,” he said gently. “I know this looks crazy. I know you probably think you’re going insane, but I promise you’re not.”

She wrapped her arms more tightly around herself. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “That’s… is that what killed Lonty?”

“Yeah,” Sam said quietly. “The spirit is possessing statues around campus. We don’t know why or what it wants yet, but we’re going to find out, and we’re going to stop it.”

Katrina swallowed, her shoulders shaking. Sam wiped his hands clean of blood, then reached out a hand to her. She let him pull her close; he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and held her against his uninjured side. “It’s okay,” he said, and when she burrowed against his chest he rested his chin on her hair. “It’s okay.”

“Why aren’t you freaking out?” she asked, her voice muffled by his shirt. “Is this… is this what Becky and Zach were talking about?”

Sam’s stomach tightened. “What did they say?”

“They said it wasn’t your brother that killed all those people, that it was something that could look like him, and that you and your brother were trying to keep other people from getting hurt.” She pushed back far enough to look up at him. “We all thought they were crazy, or that you guys had threatened them or something—”

Sam bit his lip. So much had happened in the decade since he’d left Stanford, since he’d given up the dream of having normal friends, a normal life, but he’d never quite forgotten how much it had hurt when he’d first been labeled a wanted murderer for all his old friends to see. How much it hurt to know that the friends he’d made had seen his photo in the news, had heard the declarations of _accomplice_ and _criminal_ and finally _spree killer_. Still, knowing that Becky and Zach had stood up for him… that was worth a lot. He said quietly, “It was a shapeshifter. It took Zach’s shape first, then Dean’s when we tried to stop it.”

Katrina’s eyebrows went up. “A shapeshifter? Like, what, Mystique?”

Sam couldn’t help a snort. “Not that glamorous. But yeah, basically. And it was shapeshifters again going on the killing sprees a few years ago. They were pissed at us for trying to take down their leader.” He didn’t think it was relevant to explain the difference between a normal shifter and Leviathan; Katrina had enough to process as it was.

“Take down their leader?” she repeated doubtfully. “Is that… I mean, you guys… _do_ that?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “There’s a lot of bad things out there. Not just shapeshifers, but other things. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons… you name it, we hunt it.”

“More things on Heaven and Earth, huh?” she said, some of the fear fading to dry humor.

“A lot more,” Sam agreed, and smiled.

She smiled back, hesitant at first, but slowly widening until she shook her head and leaned against his chest again. “So you’re basically Buffy,” she said. “Sam the Vampire Slayer.”

“Something like that,” he said. Her movement had made him suddenly, acutely aware that he wasn’t wearing pants. Dean had at least left him with his shorts, and Sam’s shirt was long enough to give him some cover, but, well. Katrina was warm and lithe under his hand, and her skintight workout clothes didn’t leave much to the imagination. He’d had a crush on her for most of a year back at college, but though they’d been friends, the timing had never worked out - first she’d been dating someone, then he’d started dating Jess, and then everything had fallen apart.

Now, though, he hadn’t dated anyone in years, and she wasn’t wearing a ring, and they were both full of adrenaline from fighting an animated T-Rex skeleton, and he wasn’t sure which one of them moved first but suddenly he was kissing her. She arched against him, reaching up to wind her arms around his neck, but with him sitting on the high table and her standing next to him the angle was awkward. Sam wrapped his hands around her waist and lifted her up to sit on his uninjured leg, ignoring the spike of pain as the movement jostled his wounds. She pressed closer, wriggling more firmly onto his lap, fingers sliding into his hair, and he curled his hands around her hips—

“A- _hem_ ,” Dean’s voice said from the doorway.

Sam and Katrina both jumped. Dean leaned against the doorframe, his clothes dripping wet but a smirk on his lips. “I see how it is,” he drawled. “I’m off fighting the killer T-Rex, while you guys are getting _busy_.”

“Um,” Sam said. Katrina made to slide off his lap, but he tightened his grip on her a little desperately. He still wasn’t wearing pants, and there were things Dean did _not_ need to see. Fortunately, she got the hint, and just shifted so that she didn’t have to crane her neck to see Dean. Not that little movements on his lap like that helped matters, but Sam would take what he could get.

“Uh,” Katrina said, in a desperately-looking-for-safe-topics tone of voice, “why are you wet?”

Dean’s eyes sparkled and Sam winced, because that was a perfect straight line if he’d ever heard one. From the expression on Katrina’s face, she realized it too. But Dean took pity on them and said only, “I jumped a fence and ended up in a ditch full of water. Good news is, apparently running water shorts out our spirit.”

“Yeah?” Sam said.

Dean nodded, pushing off the doorframe and entering the room. “It followed me into the ditch, but when it tried to cross the stream, it fell apart. We ain’t lucky enough for it to be dead - I saw it smoke off on the other side of the stream - but at least the Jurassic Park remake is over.”

“That’s good,” Katrina said. “Right?”

“For now,” Dean said. He crossed to the tray of medical supplies and began cleaning up, dropping wrappers into the trash can and putting the durable equipment into the room’s little sink for washing. “We still don’t know what it is or how to kill it, but it should mean we’re clear for tonight.”

“Which gives us time to do some research,” Sam added. The conversation had given him a chance to get his body under control, and he let go of Katrina. She slid off his lap and retrieved Sam’s jeans from where Dean had dropped them on the floor. They were covered in blood, and shredded from Stan’s teeth and the scissors Dean had had to use to get them off, but they were better than walking around in his shorts. Sam winced as he pulled them on, the fabric scraping over his bandages and tugging at his wounds, and Katrina gave him a sympathetic look.

“What kind of research?” she asked. “I mean, is there some kind of vampire-slayer handbook?”

Dean, still cleaning up the supplies they’d used for Sam’s leg, rolled his eyes. “I wish. Nah, it’s a lot of digging through dusty old lore books, mostly.”

“We could use your help,” Sam added. “You know Google better than we do, you might be able to spot something we can’t.”

Katrina hesitated, chewing on her lower lip. A decade later and she still had the same cute habits Sam remembered from their days as naive college kids. He fought the urge to reach for her again.

Finally she nodded, looking up at Sam with those wide green eyes. “Yeah. I can do that.”


	5. Chapter 5

They met in Katrina’s little two-bedroom apartment the next morning at nine AM sharp. It was way earlier than Dean would’ve preferred, but it had been a compromise between his insistence that Sam get some sleep and Sam’s bullheaded determination to keep working straight through the night. Dean had finally forced the compromise by pointing out that, first, the spirit seemed to be active only after midnight, and second, Sam’s jeans were so badly damaged that unless he changed into new ones, he’d be running around with his underwear hanging out all day. Which had made him blush like a girl, shoot an embarrassed glance at Katrina, and agree to at least go back to the motel. Once he’d sat down on the bed, though, he’d swayed in sudden exhaustion and it had been much easier for Dean to cajole him into sleeping for a few hours.

Sam’d actually slept, too, which was a minor miracle considering he practically had caffeine in place of blood these days. Dean had made sure he was really asleep, then faceplanted on the other bed himself. As much as Dean hated to admit it, the rest had been good for him, too. It was a hell of a lot harder to work a case for forty-eight hours straight than it had been a decade ago. Which didn’t mean he didn’t grumble when Sam shook him awake, but they swung by a Peet’s Coffee on the way to Katrina’s apartment and by the time they knocked on her door, Dean felt almost human.

Katrina answered the door wearing jeans and a low-necked t-shirt with a Cookie Monster-ified Google logo. She looked tired and drawn, but brightened when Sam handed her a steaming white-and-tan cup. He smiled nervously when he did, and said, “You, uh, you still like it black?”

She paused in the middle of inhaling the steam from the cup to cock an eyebrow at him. “Coffee creamer is blasphemy.”

Sam’s smile widened and she grinned back, and Dean tried not to feel too much like a third wheel. “Okay, kids,” he said brightly. He nudged past Katrina through the door, rubbing his hands briskly. “Time to do some research.”

“Since when are _you_ excited about research?” Sam asked from behind him.

“Since the alternative is sitting around watching you two make like Romeo and Juliet,” Dean retorted.

He was about to step out of the little tiled foyer into the living room when Katrina said, “Shoes off, please.”

Dean turned around to see that Katrina was pointing to a neat shoe rack along the wall by the door, but more importantly that she was tucked against Sam’s side, ostensibly so that he could lean on her for balance while he wrestled his shoes off and made manly little pain sounds as he moved his injured leg. Dean caught his brother’s eye and raised an eyebrow; Sam stopped looking pained long enough to give him a don’t-you-dare scowl. Dean smirked, but let Sam have it. Other than his backseat fling - Penny? Pepper? Piper? - a couple months ago, Sam hadn’t gotten any in _years_ , and Dean was glad he seemed to be feeling up to it again.

The exchange had gone right over Katrina’s head - literally; she was most of a foot shorter than Dean - and she helped Sam into the apartment’s tiny living room while Dean toed his boots off. She and Sam sat together on the couch, so Dean took the big stuffed La-Z-Boy and tossed the bag containing their laptop over to Sam. “What do we know about this thing?” he asked.

“It’s some kind of spirit,” Sam answered, shifting to put the laptop on the coffee table alongside Katrina’s sleek Macbook and a slender tablet under a keyboard cover. “It can possess inanimate objects, it wasn’t affected by salt, it didn’t like fire, and it seems to be focused on killing people.”

“And it can’t cross running water,” Dean added, remembering his trip through the narrow, flooded ditch.

“A lot of magic systems in books and RPGs have magic, or magical creatures, getting shorted out by running water,” Katrina said. “Um… how much of that stuff is true?”

“Depends,” Sam said. “Some creatures are pretty close to their image in popular culture, like poltergeists, but others are pretty different.”

Katrina nodded slowly. “I don’t know if I’m going to be much help, then,” she said. “I mean, everything I know about magic, I learned from Dungeons and Dragons.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Sam said, squeezing her shoulders gently. She leaned into his side, and Dean fought the urge to roll his eyes. Or gag.

“So,” he said. “What kind of spirit does all that?”

“Good question.” Sam frowned, brow furrowing as he thought. “The first attack was Friday night, at the Google buildings south of the 101.”

“The Quad,” Katrina supplied. “The news said the killer used the arm off a statue.”

“‘S what they said,” Dean agreed, “but the news doesn’t like printing things like ‘Evil spirit possesses statue to beat man to death’. Nobody wants to be the _Enquirer_. Except the _Enquirer_ , I guess.”

Katrina shuddered, and Sam pulled her closer. “I was down there last week,” she said quietly. “We were hosting a big tour group from eastern Europe, a bunch of exchange students, we were giving them a tour. I don’t… I can’t…” She sucked in a deep breath and didn’t finish.

“Okay,” Dean said, to let her recover. “Our spirit likes possessing statues.”

“But there’s no pattern,” Sam said. “It started with one of those big Android statues. Then a horse, then a dinosaur skeleton.”

“It used an _Android_?” Katrina asked. She looked abruptly greenish and Dean glanced around to see if there was a trash can in arm’s reach.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “A big white one.”

“It used the _whiteboard_ Android?” Katrina said. Dean spotted a little bin tucked beside the arm of the couch and stuck out a hand to hook it closer. He offered it to her; she stared blankly at it. Sam rolled his eyes at Dean and pushed the trash bin away.

To Katrina, Sam said, “What do you mean, ‘whiteboard Android’?”

“Uh,” Katrina said. She blinked rapidly a few times and then seemed to pull herself together. “It’s an Android covered in whiteboard surface. They bring it out for public events and stuff. You can write your name or whatever on it, take a picture with it. They had it down at the Quad for the exchange students. All the kids were really excited about writing on it. I’ve got photos, if you want to see.”

Dean traded a glance with Sam, knew without asking that his brother was thinking _tulpa_. “Sure,” he said. Katrina pulled her phone from her pocket and started tapping the screen with one thumb, her other hand reaching for her coffee cup. While she worked on it, Dean said to Sam, “A tulpa doesn’t make sense, though. I mean, what would people have believed it was?”

“Good question,” Sam said. “Could be something else, though. Remember that golem when we fought the time-traveling Nazi zombies?” Katrina choked on a mouthful of coffee and stared at them; Sam rubbed her back until she stopped coughing, and said, “I’ll tell you later. It wasn’t as weird as it sounds.”

Dean ignored them. “Yeah,” he said. “The golem was controlled by the writing on the paper. You think someone’s writing on these statues to animate them?”

“Maybe,” Sam said. He looked like he was going to say more, but the TV across from the couch suddenly flickered to life, and he and Dean both twitched in surprise, reaching for their weapons.

Katrina glanced back and forth between them. “It’s just a Chromecast, guys.”

“...Right,” Dean said. “Sure. Um. What’s a Chromecast?”

Katrina grinned. “It lets me do this,” she said, and pointed at the TV, which was now displaying a digital photo album from her phone.

“Oh,” Dean said, because sure, why not. Maybe it was because he was officially closer to forty than thirty, but ever since he’d come back from Purgatory he’d felt like technology was moving way too fast. He caught Sam watching him, eyes sparkling and dimples deepening like the kid was trying not to laugh, and glared. Sam just grinned and looked back at the TV.

Katrina had dozens of photos, mostly of a bunch of smiling high schoolers doing things like standing in front of a Google sign, playing with Google-branded tablets, eating lunch in a cafeteria, and… there. The killer Android statue. In the first few pictures, it was mostly blank, surrounded by kids; as Katrina kept flipping through photos, it got progressively more covered with colorful writing. Mostly just names as far as Dean could see, and typical kid stuff like “Mateusz was here” or “yo momma”—

“Wait, back up,” Sam said suddenly. Katrina flipped back to the previous picture and Sam leaned forward, squinting at the screen. “Dean, you see that?”

“No. See what?” In this particular photo, all he could make out was the backs of a few kids’ heads and half a swear word.

“There,” Sam said, and stood up to lean over the coffee table and point. But his injured leg gave out as he did, and he staggered with a startled grunt. Katrina caught him and pulled him back to the couch before he could fall, and he just sat there for a second, his face twisted with pain.

“Sammy—” Dean began, but Sam waved a hand.

“I’m fine,” he said. Dean knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t fine, not by a long shot - those teeth gouges had been deep and Sam had been limping all morning - but Sam wasn’t about to admit it in front of a girl. Sam took a deep breath, his expression smoothing, then pointed at the TV again. If his movements were much more careful than before, Dean wasn’t going to mention it.

Instead, Dean leaned closer to the TV himself, frowning absently as he tried to figure out what had caught Sam’s eye. Finally he spotted it - something drawn near the base of the statue that wasn’t writing. Katrina seemed to see it too, because she zoomed in on the spot. “What is it?” she asked them.

“I’ve seen that before,” Sam said. His pain apparently forgotten, he hauled the laptop onto his knees and began tapping at the keyboard. “Uh, what’s your wifi password?”

“Long,” Katrina said. “Here.” She leaned over, nudging Sam’s fingers away from the keyboard and beginning to type. Dean couldn’t help but notice that the angle she’d chosen to hold her shoulders gave Sam a perfect view down the wide neck of her shirt - and that Sam was taking advantage of the view. Then he seemed to feel Dean’s eyes on him and looked up, blushing furiously. Dean waggled his eyebrows and Sam glared, pointedly keeping his gaze away from Katrina’s shirt until she sat back again.

“Thanks,” Sam said to her. She responded with a smile that made Dean think she’d noticed Sam’s attention and didn’t mind at all. Sam bent over the keyboard once more and Katrina started flipping through photos again, looking for any better angles on the drawing.

“There,” Dean said. Katrina spotted it as well, zooming in again. From this angle, most of the drawing was visible. It was at the bottom of the statue on its back, more or less where the base of the spine would have been on a human. A spiral of tight, vaguely Arabic lettering circled around a central image of a round blue eye. Dean frowned. “Isn’t that an evil eye?” he asked Sam.

“Sort of,” Sam agreed without looking up. “It’s a nazar, a talisman to protect against the evil eye, that originated in the Ottoman Empire.”

Katrina gave Sam an impressed look. Dean said to her, “In case you haven’t noticed yet, he’s a giant nerd.”

She smiled a little. “We had a game, back at Stanford,” she said, almost wistfully. “If you could ask a question about history or mythology that could stump Sam, everyone else had to buy you coffee for a week.”

Sam paused his typing to look up at her in surprise. “I didn’t know that.”

She nudged his shoulder. “Well, yeah, if you knew about it you could rig the game.”

Dean chuckled. Sam glared at him, his cheeks turning pink. He opened his mouth and closed it again a couple times, then apparently gave up trying to respond and went back to the laptop. A moment later he grinned triumphantly. “Here we go,” he said, and spun the laptop around so Dean and Katrina could see the screen. “It’s an offshoot of a Babylonian devil’s trap.”

“Doesn’t look like a devil’s trap,” Dean said, frowning. The photo on the screen was of a ratty, stained old ragdoll. On its cloth back was drawn the same spiral of letters as on the Android statue, around the same blue eye. It looked like it had been scanned in from one of the books in the Men of Letters’ library, part of Sam’s project to digitize the entire collection in an attempt to recover what the Steins had damaged.

“A Babylonian devil’s trap is different than the ones we use,” Sam explained. “Originally, they were drawn inside clay bowls and buried upside-down beneath the corners of a house or other building, to trap evil energy and ward off the Devil.”

“Okay,” Dean said skeptically. “Then why’s it on a doll?”

Sam held up a finger. “Because when the Greeks invaded Babylon in the fourth century BC, some of the Babylonians fled - and took the tradition with them. They didn’t have houses anymore, so instead they modified the devil’s trap to work on a doll. If a person seemed to be cursed, they would create a doll that symbolically represented the person and put the devil’s trap on it. Any negative energy directed at them would go to the doll instead.”

Dean thought he could see where this was going. “And with enough bad mojo, the doll would start moving around,” he guessed.

“Exactly,” Sam agreed.

“So basically,” Dean said, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers, “that Android statue is an inverted Voodoo doll for all of Google.”

“Um,” Sam said. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Great. How do we kill it?”

Sam spun the laptop around again, fingers moving on the keyboard. “You were supposed to keep a close eye on the doll, and as soon as it showed signs of life, you made a fire out of fig leaves, quince branches, and salt, and burned the doll to ash to destroy the collected evil energy. You had to do it right away or it would animate and start attacking, or even jump to bigger vessels that were better able to contain its growing power.”

“Explains why it didn’t like the flares,” Dean said, and Sam nodded. “But,” Dean continued, “how the heck did this thing get enough negative energy in, what, four days?” He glanced at Katrina, who’d been watching them in wide-eyed shock; she gave a jerky little nod. “Four days, to go from zero to robot Chucky?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I mean, Google’s big, any big company is going to have people who hate it, but that kind of general low-level hate’s probably way too spread out and far away to actually reach the trap.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, considering it, then looked at Katrina. “I guess there’ve been protests against Google and other big tech companies recently, haven’t there?”

“Not recently,” she said. “The anti-tech protesters have mostly settled down, and they were up in San Fran anyway. And I don’t remember seeing any warnings about protests on campus last week.”

“So who else is running around near that statue who’d hate Google enough to channel this kind of killer mojo?” Dean asked. “Construction projects, maybe?”

“Just proposals,” Katrina answered absently. “The NIMBYs aren’t real happy about those, but I didn’t think…” Then she clapped a hand over her eyes and sank down against the couch. “Oh my God.”

“What?” Dean and Sam said together.

“It’s…” She took a breath, lowering her hand, then let out a giggle that was more than a little hysterical. “The Android was at the edge of the campus. Right up near the 101. And every damn day, thousands of people drive along the 101 and hate Google and Apple and Facebook and Yahoo for causing all the traffic they’re trapped in.” She covered her eyes again. “We’re being attacked by the collective freaking _road rage_ of everybody in Silicon Valley.”

Dean traded an incredulous look with Sam, though honestly, at least half the incredulity was from the realization that she was probably right. “Road rage,” he echoed.

“That’s a new one,” Sam agreed.

“Road rage,” Dean said again. “Seriously?”

“It makes sense,” Sam said. “It’s not particularly focused anger, but it probably wouldn’t have to be, if there’s that much of it that close for that long.”

“Son of a bitch,” Dean muttered. “Okay, fine. So we’re up against the spiritual embodiment of the road rage of thousands of residents of Silicon Valley. How are we gonna gank it?”

Sam grinned. “I think I have an idea.”


	6. Chapter 6

They spent the next few hours making plans. When Katrina left after lunch to go start her shift, Sam and Dean went shopping for supplies. It was a good thing the spirit didn’t seem to become active until after midnight, because it took them most of the rest of the day to find and drive to every nursery and garden in the Bay Area that sold fig and quince. The pile they ended up with wasn’t very big, but they loaded up on regular firewood and salt and decided it would have to be enough.

Sam couldn’t help but be amused as they drove around. Dean was clearly irritated by the horrible traffic, but every time he got beyond the scowling-and-glaring stage he’d remember that being pissed at the traffic - and the reason for the traffic - would just make their jobs that much harder. He wasn’t very good at calming himself down, but he tried, and honestly the fact that he could do it at all, after nearly two years of wearing the Mark of Cain, was a relief to Sam.

They pulled into the parking lot of Shoreline Amphitheatre around ten PM. The amphitheatre sat at the northernmost point of the Google office complex, across the road from the Googleplex and just west of the Crittenden campus. Katrina had said that Google had some kind of agreement with the amphitheatre to park some of their shuttle buses in its parking lot overnight, and sure enough, rows of enormous white or grey luxury buses lined fully half the lot. Dean parked the Impala near the biggest open space they could find, up front near the ticket booth, and he and Sam set to offloading their supplies. When they’d finished, Dean moved the car to a distant corner of the lot, where it would hopefully be safe from whatever was going to happen.

Sam, meanwhile, started building the fire, laying the firewood in a long line across the open area and spreading the fig leaves and quince branches on top, then dusting the whole pile with a generous heaping of salt. His injured leg ached despite the tylenol he’d taken earlier, and he had trouble putting weight on the muscles - moving too fast or too sharply sent spikes of pain through his thigh and groin. He’d been trying to hide the limp from Dean all day, but his brother had been watching him like he was afraid Sam would drop dead at any second. Sam wasn’t going to drop dead, but he _was_ going to be glad when this was over and he didn’t need to be standing anymore.

Dean finally returned, arms full of weapons, more road flares, an extra flashlight, and two cups of coffee from the thermos they’d filled before coming to Shoreline. February nights were cold even in California, and Sam accepted one of the cups gratefully. It would be warm enough once they lit the fire, but it wasn’t time for that yet.

Dean divvied up the flares and the weapons, eyeing Sam critically. “Sit down,” he ordered, not ungently.

Sam rolled his eyes. “I’m fine.”

“It’s eleven PM,” Dean said. “You’ve got an hour before the action starts.” He gave Sam a shove toward the front of the parking lot, where a handful of benches surrounded the ticket booth at the entrance to the amphitheatre. Sam considered protesting, but honestly Dean was right. He needed to be ready to run when the time came, and wearing himself out standing on his injured leg out of sheer stubbornness was stupid. He headed for the benches, Dean following at his shoulder, and they sat together, huddling a little against the cold breeze.

“So,” Dean said conversationally, “I don’t like leaving Lucifer running around out there wearing Cas, but we’ve had jack shit by way of leads and I figure it won’t hurt to stay in town for a few days.”

Sam squinted at him. “Why do you want to stay in town?” he asked, even though he knew where this was going. Damn big brothers.

Dean cocked an eyebrow right back. “Sammy,” he said lightly. “You gonna tell me you don’t want to spend a couple days reaping the rewards of saving the girl and avenging her friends?”

“Shut up,” Sam growled. “She’s not a damsel in distress.”

“She’s a damsel,” Dean said. “This is distress. You gonna tell me you don’t think she’ll want to show her appreciation?”

“You’re gross,” Sam said, and gave Dean a shove. He’d actually been trying very hard to _not_ think about what would happen when this was over, when they’d killed the spirit and stopped the murders. Sure, he’d had a crush on Katrina - but that had been more than ten years ago. And sure, they’d kissed last night, but that had been the adrenaline rush and the physical contact. He kept remembering how scared Katrina had looked when they’d cornered her in the little conference room, how she’d called them murderers.

Dean had his mouth open to retort, so Sam cut in, “It’s not gonna happen, Dean. Besides, we gotta find Cas.”

Dean’s expression darkened, like it always did when he thought about Castiel’s plight. “Yeah,” he agreed, his voice gruff. “But we need a win, too. _You_ need a win.”

Sam looked away, his chest aching. For a second he felt Lucifer’s hand again, ice cold as it cut through his skin and bone to close around his soul. “I’m fine.”

“That ain’t what I said,” Dean said mildly.

Sam didn’t answer, and they lapsed into silence for a while, sipping coffee and trying not to shiver in the February cold. Eventually a soft electric whine cut through the still night air, and they looked up to see a sleek little Volt pull into the parking lot and come to a stop near the Impala. Katrina climbed out, wearing jeans, sneakers, and a puffy winter jacket, with her blonde hair wound in a neat bun on the back of her head. She shivered as she looked around the lot, whether from cold or fear or both Sam couldn’t tell, then she spotted them and crossed the lot to join them.

“Hey,” she said quietly.

“Midnight already?” Sam asked.

She nodded. “I, uh, I guess it’s time.”

Dean stretched, his spine emitting several audible pops. “Yup. You guys know what to do?”

“Stay here, stay quiet, light the fire when you get close,” Katrina recited.

“And listen to Sam,” Dean added.

“And listen to Sam,” she repeated. It was dark enough that Sam wasn’t sure he’d actually seen her shoot him a not-quite-shy look.

“Good,” Dean said, and stood up.

“You sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Sam asked.

Dean raised an eyebrow at him. “You can barely walk, Doctor Grant. I can’t carry your ass _and_ run like hell from a killer statue.”

Sam scowled. Dean was right, but that didn’t mean Sam had to like letting his brother be the bait for their trap. Dean clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to make him sway on the bench, patted the spot under his jacket where he kept his gun, and turned toward the entrance of the parking lot. “Besides,” he said cheerfully, “that spirit’s probably moved on to some other statue by now. I don’t think there’s anything on campus worse than a freaking Tyrannosaurus Rex.”

“And now you’ve gone and jinxed it,” Sam said. He gave Dean a rueful grin. Dean winked in response, and took off into the darkness.

*           *           *

“Man,” Katrina said around chattering teeth, “if I’d known how exciting it was to hunt monsters I’d have quit Google years ago.”

Sam snorted. Dean had been gone almost half an hour, the seconds counting down in the back of Sam’s brain like the timer on a bomb. But they’d heard nothing at all the whole time - no roars, no screams, no gunshots. The night was quiet enough up here, away from the highway, that any sound should have carried. Sam kept telling himself that the silence was a good sign, that Dean wouldn’t go down without a very noisy fight.

But he still hated this part.

It didn’t help that Katrina was here. He’d argued against it, and so had Dean, but she’d stood her ground. Stan the T-Rex had been more interested in her than in either Winchester, which meant the spirit probably had a way to tell who was a Googler and who wasn’t. If they needed a distraction, or a way to get the thing’s attention, she would be useful. Likewise, she had badge access to all the Google buildings. If things went south, she could get inside - or get them inside - and get help. None of that meant Sam had to like her being here, in danger, though.

“If we told everyone how glamorous it was,” he said to Katrina, “everyone would do it and then we’d be out of a job.”

Her turn to snort. “You really do this?” she asked quietly. “All the time?”

“All the time,” he agreed, just as quietly.

“And no one knows?”

He shook his head. “Who’d believe us? I can’t tell you how many medical examiners and police officers and regular people we’ve met who’ve _seen_ a ghost or a vampire or a demon, and still don’t want to accept it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That... must be frustrating.”

“Sometimes,” Sam said. “Sometimes it makes our jobs easier. No men in white coats running around, no publicity. But sometimes it goes bad.”

She was quiet for a few seconds, then, “Like the… shapeshifters? The ones you said framed you?”

He nodded. “They were powerful, and they caught Dean and me off-guard when they showed up. Burned down our friend’s house where we were staying, and nearly killed us. We went underground to try to get them off our backs, so they decided to flush us out by starting a country-wide manhunt for us.”

“That’s awful,” she said, and shivered.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. The people killed by Leviathan were just that many more names on his conscience, that many more innocent people who’d died because of a supernatural war they knew nothing about and couldn’t control. He wished, sometimes, that he could stop caring.

Katrina was watching him with wide green eyes, and he tried to pretend he didn’t see pity in them. He sighed and scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “So, um,” he said, not caring if the attempt to change the subject was painfully obvious. “What kind of statue do you think we’ll see? Might be nice to know what we’re up against.”

Katrina’s mouth twisted ruefully, but she let him change the subject, looking across the parking lot at the driveway that rose up the side of the hill toward the road that separated the amphitheatre from the Googleplex. “He said he lost the, um, spirit,” stumbling a little over the word like she still couldn’t quite believe it, “at the canal?”

Sam nodded. “What’s over there? I thought most of the Google buildings were on this side of the canal.”

“There’s GWC - Google West Campus - and the Heritage and Bigtable buildings, and, um…” She paused, thinking. “Landings. And…” Her face went abruptly white.

“Trina?” Sam prompted nervously. “What is it?”

“Landings,” she repeated, and looked up at him. “Which is where they just moved the—”

A soft sound broke over the quiet night, a low distant rumbling noise, and it took Sam a second to realize it sounded like that moment in cartoons right before an entire stampede comes running over the horizon. Katrina heard it too, because she looked up at the driveway again, squinting as if that would help her see in the darkness. Sam followed her gaze, fingers closing around the matchbook in his pocket, because that sounded an awful lot like running feet.

A _lot_ of running feet.

A dark form appeared for a moment at the top of the driveway, silhouetted against the faint glow of the lights of the Googleplex: Dean, running as fast as his feet could carry him. He pitched forward down the driveway, arms windmilling as he fought to keep his balance on the incline, and screamed, “ _SAM!_ ”

Sam yanked the matches from his pocket, saw from the corner of his eye Katrina doing the same with the pack they’d given her, though they both kept their eyes fixed on the driveway behind Dean. A moment later, the bulky, round, cartoonish figure of an Android statue appeared at the top of the driveway. In one hand it held what looked like a balloon - no, Sam realized suddenly. Not a balloon, a _lollipop_. It was one of the lawn statues from the famous Android garden, where Google kept enormous, whimsical statues designed to represent every one of their dessert-themed mobile operating system versions.

Sam glanced at Katrina, willing her not to freeze in the face of the action. But she was still staring in horror at the top of the driveway, and Sam looked up again to see… another silhouette against the night sky, this one shaped like a gingerbread man. And then another, and another, both shaped more or less like regular Androids except one had a torso stuffed with jelly beans, and the other had a flat, chocolate-colored body stamped with the distinctive bars of a Kit-Kat.

...and then more, and Sam could hear Katrina counting in a terrified breathless voice: “Lollipop, Gingerbread, Jelly Bean, Kit-Kat, Eclair, Honeycomb, Froyo, Cupcake, Ice Cream Sandwich, Donut, Marshmallow.”

It wasn’t just one statue this time.

They were under attack by the entire Android army.


	7. Chapter 7

“SAM!” Dean screamed. He’d lost sight of his brother past all the buses in the parking lot; he could only hope Sam had seen him come flying over the hill. His legs screamed and his chest burned, breath clawing ragged in his throat. The Android army had found him in the street in front of a trio of buildings just west of the Googleplex, and apparently the bridge over the running water of the canal had been enough to insulate them because when he’d bolted, they’d had no trouble following him.

He’d booked it back up the street to the driveway which ran along the east end of the Googleplex to connect Charleston and Shoreline roads. He’d mapped it out earlier as the easiest path to navigate in the dark at a dead run, but that had turned out to be a mistake because the marshmallow Android stood next to that driveway. Or rather, had stood, because as the army had approached, Dean had seen the statue’s beady black eyes flash grim fiery red, then it had joined the chase.

Dean was inordinately glad that none of the statues had much by way of legs, because that was the only thing that let him stay ahead of them. The Androids’ legs were stubby, inflexible little things, while the dessert statues had to make do with rolling or hopping awkwardly - but damn if the fuckers weren’t fast as hell doing it. He’d sort of hoped the sloped driveway down into the amphitheatre parking lot would trip them up as much as it had nearly done to him, and sure enough, the Androids with their stubby little legs had to slow down and hobble to keep from tipping over.

The desserts had no such trouble.

The donut simply rolled, and Dean had to leap to one side, nearly losing his balance and faceplanting on the asphalt, to keep from getting bowled over. The cupcake and the frozen yogurt cup both flopped onto their sides and joined the donut in rolling; their not-exactly-cylindrical shapes kept them from rolling directly at Dean but did force him to stay in the middle of the driveway between them. Which set him up for the freaking éclair to rush at him like a road roller on crack.

Dean flung himself desperately into the air as the éclair thundered up against his heels. It caught the backs of his legs as he jumped and sent him spinning wildly through the air to crash hard onto the pavement at the bottom of the driveway. For a few seconds the world spun crazily and he couldn’t breathe, a vise closing around his chest, but from the corner of his eye he could see the donut whirling around for a second pass. He forced his body to move, shoving back to his feet and staggering out of the way of its attack. But the Androids were nearing the bottom of the driveway now, too, speeding up as the ground leveled out, and Dean didn’t have time to stand around.

He bolted, weaving through the hulking shapes of the luxury Google buses in a desperate attempt to keep the donut or the éclair from lining up another run at him. Finally he reached the open area where he and Sam had laid their trap. The mound of wood and leaves and salt stretched twenty feet long across the center of the space, and Sam and Katrina stood at opposite ends of it, hands braced to light match packets.

Sam’s eyes widened, all the warning Dean had. He flung himself sideways, and the frozen yogurt’s swirled cement ice cream clipped his shoulder instead of taking his head off at the neck. The blow sent him staggering and for a bad second he thought the éclair, hot on the yogurt’s fruit-studded heels, would crush him right there.

Then Katrina stepped forward, waved her arms over her head, and yelled, “Hey! You want Googlers? I’m right here!”

Cement desserts didn’t have faces on which to show emotion, but Dean sensed a distinct chill in the air as the éclair refocused on her. The frozen yogurt and the cupcake, spinning around for another pass, also shifted subtly, and from somewhere behind a row of buses came a low grinding noise that was probably the donut. Dean regained his balance and started running again, shouting over his shoulder, “That’s right! Come on, you sons of bitches! Come and get us!”

He bolted for the mound of wood, the killer desserts hot on his heels. Sam stood tense, braced to light the matches, though Dean barely saw him, too focused on trying to stay ahead of the statues. He reached the pile of wood and vaulted it at speed, and maybe next year he’d try out for the goddamn Olympics because he cleared it with a foot to spare. The desserts didn’t even bother to try - they just bowled straight into the pile.

“SAM!” Dean yelled, but his brother was already moving, matches crackling to life in his hands. He dropped the whole pack onto the wood pile and fire roared across it. At the other end of the pile, Katrina did the same, the flames meeting in the middle like a hellish gate.

Trapped in the middle of the woodpile, the desserts couldn’t escape. From somewhere behind the buses, the lagging Android statues let out a chorus of eerie howls - probably the only sound they were capable of making with no real mouths. The desserts, which lacked even anything resembling faces, couldn’t scream - but they writhed in obvious agony as the fire raced up their cement bodies, charring paint and melting plastic embellishments.

Dean skidded to a stop on the far side of the fire, chest heaving as he struggled to breathe. He was already out of breath from running a mile of hills, and now smoke threatened to choke him. Either they’d gotten really wet wood or something about the fig and quince produced a lot of smoke, because in just a few seconds the whole parking lot was filled with a thick grey haze.

“Dean?” Sam called, his voice worried. Dean could just make him out, a silhouette in the smoke.

“Here!” he called back. “I’m fine.”

“Where’s the rest?” Sam asked. Smoke whorled and shifted as he came closer, Katrina on his heels. “I only saw four in the fire.”

“The hill slowed ‘em down,” Dean answered, panting. Sam grabbed his arm, supporting him, and he leaned gratefully into the touch.

“Damn it,” Sam muttered. “Gonna be hard to get them to run through the fire now.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Dean said. “Even if we have to—DOWN!”

He hauled on Sam’s arm, toppling them both to the ground an instant before a gigantic cement lollipop swung through the air where they’d been standing. The Android statue holding it made that eerie scream again, fury in its fiery eyes. Katrina leaped back with a startled yelp, then had to dodge again as another Android, this one with a body full of jelly beans, tried to slam into her.

“Dammit!” Dean spat. He and Sam rolled to opposite sides of the lollipop Android and climbed back to their feet. More statues loomed out of the thickening smoke: the gingerbread man, the ice cream sandwich, Kit Kat, and Marshmallow Androids, the giant square honeycomb, its cement bee buzzing angrily. Dean gestured frantically at Sam and Katrina. “Move!”

They took off, Katrina darting past the gingerbread man and ducking under a blow from the cement marshmallow to vanish into the smoke. Sam made it four long steps before his injured leg gave out and he collapsed to the ground with a cry of pain.

“Sam!” Dean screamed. But the honeycomb loomed in front of him, blocking his view of his brother and forcing him to dodge as it tried to bodyslam him to the ground. Dean ended up near the fire, its heat scorching in the chill February air, the bright orange flame and hot red sparks from the burning salt turning the smoke around him into a hellish inferno. He’d long since learned to ignore the Hell memories, but the heat and the light still locked him in place for a bad second - just long enough for the Kit Kat to smash a chocolate arm into his back.

Dean staggered, windmilling his arms to keep from falling into the fire. His flailing hand found the Kit Kat’s side and he hauled, expecting to rebalance himself - but instead the movement pulled the statue off-balance, its thin legs unable to keep it upright against the sudden weight of a full-grown man. Dean pivoted, shoving hard on the statue, and flung it forward into the fire.

It screamed as the flames took it, its voice joined by the chorus of the other Androids, and Dean had less than a second to try to catch his breath before he had to dodge another swipe of the lollipop. He hit the ground and rolled, trying to put some distance between himself and the Android; when he shoved back to his feet he spotted Katrina running past with the jelly bean Android hot on her heels. She tried the same move Dean had done a minute ago, vaulting the burning woodpile - and damn the girl had guts; Dean didn’t think he could have leaped through fire like that - but Jelly Bean skidded to a stop and swerved around the end of the pile instead.

 _Dammit_ , Dean thought. The spirit controlling the Androids was smart enough not to fall for the same trick twice, especially now that the fire was lit. But then how the hell were they going to get the statues into the fire?

“Sam!” he called, squinting against the smoke. “SAM!”

His brother didn’t answer, and Dean’s heart stuttered in his chest. The last he’d seen Sam, the kid had fallen to the ground. Had one of the statues gotten him? “SAM!” he bellowed, but before he could look further, the gingerbread man loomed out of the smoke and he had to skip backward out of its reach. He ran around the end of the bonfire, squinting against the smoke and the dancing orange firelight to try to spot Sam, but he only saw Katrina, trapped with her back to the fire by four Androids. The gingerbread man and the honeycomb rounded the end of the bonfire behind Dean, and he realized with a surge of fear that the statues had backed him and Katrina up against the flames.

Six statues surrounded them in a semicircle, the fire hot at their backs. Katrina edged closer to Dean, her green eyes huge with terror. Dean pushed her behind him - closer to the fire, but she’d jumped it once, she could do it again if she had to - and dug in his jacket pocket for a road flare. He thought if he popped it and made a run for the gingerbread man, he might be able to throw it off-balance long enough for him and Katrina to slip by—

A deep blast of sound cut through the night, drowning the crackle of flames and the Androids’ cries of victory. Startled, Dean jerked his head up, squinting against the smoke, struggling to see what had made the noise, if it was another statue, if they were even more fucked than they’d been two seconds ago—

A grey and black Google bus, nearly invisible in the swirling grey smoke, roared across the asphalt toward them. Dean could just make out Sam through the windshield, hands steady on the wheel as he gunned the bus toward the Androids and blared the horn again. He caught Dean’s eye, just for a second but long enough for Dean to realize what Sam meant to do.

Dean cracked the road flare to flaming, spitting life and waved it at the Androids, who had started to turn toward Sam and the bus. “Hey! Fuglies!” he shouted. They spun back around to face him, and every one of their eyes lit up with angry orange hatred. The moment they did, Dean shoved Katrina toward the fire. “Go!” he yelled.

She went, vaulting the flames with an ease born of terrified adrenaline. Dean waved the flare at the Androids one more time, trying to keep their attention. Sam and his bus were barely fifty feet away and they only had one shot at this. The bus’s horn blared once more and this time the Androids did turn, and then Dean didn’t have time to stick around to see if they fled. He leaped the bonfire, using the lifeless cement body of the éclair statue as a springboard and feeling flames lick at his legs. He hit the ground on the far side and collapsed, rolling to put out the flames and coming back to his feet in time to see Sam spin the bus’s wheel hard to the right.

Luxury buses aren’t meant for sharp turns, especially not at sixty miles an hour. Tires screamed and metal groaned as the bus tried to turn and instead began to topple. It hit the ground on its side and skidded the last twenty feet to the fire.

The Androids tried to move, but the bus was huge and they’d been clustered close together, herding Dean and Katrina toward the fire. It slammed into them, driving them ahead of it like a tsunami wave and shoving them into the flames. The statues howled as the flames took them, a hellish chorus of screams rising from the inferno and for a second all Dean could think of was Hell, knives cutting into his flesh and his knives cutting into others’ flesh, the sheer joy of being a demon and free of morality, of swinging a hammer at Sam’s head—

Sam.

Sam was still inside the bus. The bus which had fallen onto the driver’s side and skidded into a twenty-foot-long bonfire that was licking hungrily at its metal-and-plastic frame.

“SAMMY!” Dean screamed, and scrambled for the bus. The flames roared and leaped at him like living things, but he clawed his way up the bus’s exposed undercarriage and onto its side, which was now its top. He found the open passenger door and peered down into the bus.

His brother lay crumpled on top of the driver’s-side window, wedged awkwardly against the steering wheel. His eyelids were fluttering and he was struggling to move, but couldn’t seem to coordinate his limbs enough to push himself up. Fire licked at the windshield in front of him, and burning coals glimmered through the window beneath him.

“Sam?” Dean called down to him. “Sam! Come on, man, we gotta get you out of here.”

Sam groaned and shook his head vaguely. Dean stretched out on the side of the bus, hooking his toes against the undercarriage, and reached both arms down through the door. “Come on, Sammy,” he coaxed. “Come on, wake up, let’s move.”

This time Sam seemed to really hear him. He blinked rapidly, then shoved himself up away from the window, hissing in pain when his hands touched the overheated glass. Blood streaked the driver’s seat, the window, and the steering wheel and soaked his jeans, but he managed to get himself up onto his uninjured knee and reached up for Dean’s hands. Dean grabbed his wrists and pulled, hauling him upright. He didn’t have the leverage to drag him out the rest of the way, but Sam was tall enough that he could brace his good foot on the side of the driver’s seat and clamber up through the door. Dean hauled on his jacket, steadying him and providing support when his injured leg tried to give out again, and then Sam crawled out on the side of the bus next to Dean.

Dean slid over the side of the bus first, landing on the asphalt of the parking lot and reaching up for Sam. He could smell fuel; the bus would go up in flames at any moment. Sam slid down, landing hard and falling against Dean when his bad leg couldn’t take his weight. Dean ducked under his shoulder and slipped an arm around his waist, and together they staggered away from the burning bus.

*           *           *

Katrina found them a few minutes later. They’d retreated to the benches near the ticket booth and sat coughing in the smoke. Sam was at least focusing correctly again, and Dean hoped he’d gotten away with nothing more than a mild concussion and his T-Rex bite wounds torn back open.

“That was all of them,” Katrina reported. Her voice was hoarse from the smoke and she looked exhausted, but she was in one piece. “I checked all over the parking lot. I think we got it.”

“Good,” Dean said tiredly. This part sucked, but Katrina had warned them that Google had private security guards, and they couldn’t afford to stay here. “Let’s move. The cops’ll be here soon.”

“Oh,” Katrina said. “Um. Right.”

Sam groaned as Dean hauled him up off the bench, and Katrina darted around to his other side. She was too short to really support him, but he leaned on her anyway as they crossed the parking lot to the Impala. Dean let him, because if Sam was feeling good enough to pretend to be more injured than he was in order to get feminine comfort, then he wasn’t _that_ badly injured. Still, Dean kept half an eye on them both as he did a quick pass of the area, making sure they hadn’t left anything behind that could identify them. Katrina helped Sam get settled in the Impala’s passenger seat, making worried noises at the blood soaking his jeans and the bruise on his temple where he’d hit the window. Sam, in turn, kept asking if she was all right and fussing about the burn marks on her shoes.

Which meant Dean got to sneak up on them and announce loudly, “Okay, lovebirds, time to scram.”

They jumped apart guiltily, Katrina flushing a deep pink and Sam hitting Dean with his most annoyed glare. Dean smirked back as he swung into the driver’s seat. They’d ganked the bad guy and saved the girl. He’d get Sam patched back up and send him and Katrina back to her place, and then Dean would find a bar that was still open. Compared to everything else they were facing - Amara, Lucifer, the end of the world - saving a bunch of techies from a murderous road rage spirit didn’t seem like much.

But a win was a win, and they deserved a celebration.


	8. Chapter 8

The news blamed the destruction and burning of Google’s iconic Android statues and one of its luxury buses on anti-tech extremists, citing the previous year’s heated protests up in San Francisco. Officially the police couldn’t pin anything on anyone, but - as they’d told Dean when he’d swung by the station in his FBI getup - _unofficially_ , they were also blaming anti-tech extremists. Google issued a press statement pleading for peaceful discourse instead of violence, and asking for respect in the wake of the two mysterious deaths.

Katrina called in sick the next night, her last of the shift, ostensibly to grieve her murdered shift partner but also to recover from the Androids’ attack. Sam stayed with her and tried to ignore how smug Dean had looked when he’d dropped him off at her apartment. Sam wasn’t doing it to get anything out of it; he was just worried about her.

Not that they _didn’t_ sleep together, of course. Sam’s injuries meant they had to take it slow, but somehow the gentleness of their nights was even better than his wild backseat fling with a stranger named Piper. And with Katrina snuggled warm against his side, Sam could sleep without the nightmares that had haunted him since Limbo.

But it wasn’t just about the sex. Katrina had kept in touch with a lot of their Stanford classmates over the years, and she spent hours showing him their Facebook profiles, telling him how they’d turned out, who’d married whom and how many kids everyone had ended up with, who was still single and loving it like she was. People Sam hadn’t seen in a decade, who’d gone on to have successful careers and lives. Seeing that, knowing they were safe in part because of things Sam had done, made it hurt less to remember that they probably thought he was a criminal.

Sam, in turn, told Katrina hunting stories, told her about the monsters they’d killed and the people they’d saved. She listened with a fascination that Sam suspected would lead to a hunting career of her own, or at least a role as an information nexus like Bobby’d been. Sitting in Silicon Valley, with Google’s extensive resources and the inquisitive mind of an engineer, she was well-positioned to do it.

Dean turned up at Katrina’s apartment three days later, with a Santa Cruz souvenir cup and a swath of new freckles across his nose from the sun. “That was fun,” he announced cheerfully. “Sunlight, Sammy. We need to get some windows in the Bunker.”

Sam just snorted. Dean had probably spent the whole time on a bar patio, nursing beers and poring over the laptop for any sign of Lucifer, Cas, or Amara. But he couldn’t argue that the break had been good for both of them, even if it was time to head back.

“Take care of yourself,” Katrina told him quietly as he pulled on his shoes. “And if you need anything, call me, okay?”

“I will,” Sam said. He leaned down and kissed her, gentle and slow. “Try not to let anyone draw any more occult symbols on campus.”

“Definitely,” she agreed. “And Sam… Thank you.”

He ducked his head, aware of the blush rising on his cheeks. “Trina—”

“This is the part where you say, ‘You’re welcome’,” she told him, smiling impishly. She stood on her toes to kiss him again. “I’m glad you came.”

He smiled back, self-conscious with the praise. Dean, waiting just outside the open door of Katrina’s apartment, rolled his eyes and said, “Time’s a-wasting, Sammy. We wait too long, we’re gonna be stuck in traffic for hours.”

“Can’t have that,” Sam said, and grinned. Katrina waved to them as they climbed into the Impala, and Sam watched her in the side mirror until the car rounded a corner out of sight.

He looked up to find Dean giving him a sidelong glance. “What?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” Dean said. “How’re you doing?”

Sam didn’t think he meant the bite wounds, which still hurt but were healing fine. He shrugged. “I’m—”

“Don’t say it,” Dean interrupted. “Not unless you mean it.” He met Sam’s eyes for a second. “You all right?”

Sam hesitated, thinking about it. Lucifer was still free somewhere out there, and memories of the Cage still lingered at the edges of Sam’s mind. But they weren’t as close as they’d been a few days ago. He didn’t think he’d ever really, truly be _all right_ , not after… everything, not while Lucifer still existed, while the scars from his hands still marked Sam’s soul. Maybe not ever, because that wasn’t something you just got over, no matter how hard you tried. But even so…

“Yeah,” he said quietly, and meant it. “Yeah, I’m good.”

**THE END**


End file.
